My helmet retreated into my suit, disappearing in the folds of metal around my neck as I took in a deep, greedy gulp of air. I wasn’t without oxygen before. No, the suit’s system made sure of that. It was only that mine was the first suit to react to the upgrade, and if there was going to be a problem with it, I wanted to expose it before the others’ suits reacted the same way. Better for me to die than all of us. At least, if that happened, Billy wouldn’t end up alone out here.
As it turned out, the wireless filtration worked perfectly. The toxic gases of this place were instantly and silently converted into oxygen. It was a quick and comfortable experience that made me wonder why I hadn’t opted for this sooner. Then I remembered just how much this system normally cost and that explained it immediately.
I looked around as the same thing happened to the ladies. Mina was first, her helmet retreating to reveal short cropped dark hair swooped over to one side. With the whole of her face in view, I couldn’t deny that she was a striking woman. The beauty mark on her cheek and full lips that would have been inviting in almost any other circumstance. Still, there was a vulnerability about her. For all her bravado and bullishness, seeing her standing her, exposed as she was without her helmet, I couldn’t help but see something almost delicate behind her eyes, something almost broken.
“What?” she asked, obviously noticing the way I was looking at her.
“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “I just wanted to make sure it worked.”
“No such luck, Ryder,” she scoffed. “Works just fine. You’ll have to settle for being second in command a bit longer.”
“Didn’t realize he was second,” Claire said, walking up beside me. Turning, I saw her hair had spilled out down her back. She settled near me, her hip jutted out almost defiantly and her mouth twisted into what was, by now, a stalwart scowl. “I just kinda thought he was a tagalong.”
“Tagalong or not, he outranks you, and you’ll do well to remember that,” Mina said, her tone all business and her eyes looking past Claire to Jill. “You all right?”
I turned and saw the purple haired woman standing in an almost hunched over position, her eyes on the ground.
Instinctively, I started over toward her, looking for signs of what could be wrong. Was her filtration system acting up? Was I about to witness a tragedy the likes of which the Alliance hadn’t seen in years?
“Stop,” Mina said, catching up with me and laying a hand on my shoulder. “She has to do this herself.”
“I’m fine!” Jill said, her face twisted up almost painfully. She looked up at me, a slightly veiled sense of panic in her eyes. “I’ll be fine.”
“Her uncle,” Claire said from beside me, “he was one of the people killed when this thing malfunctioned the first time.” She shrugged. “The idea of it has always wigged her out.”
“What?” I asked, my eyes narrowing. “Well, then why in fuck’s sake would you ever agree to do it?”
“Because I’m not some little girl!” Jill screamed, thrusting herself upright and glaring at me with furious purple eyes. “I told you, this is all I ever wanted to do, and by God, I’m going to do it. I’m on a damned alien planet millions and millions of miles away from anybody I’ve ever cared about. I got things shooting at me, gunning for me, wanting to rip me apart. I don’t need to be frightened of a damn piece of equipment.” She blinked at me, and it looked as though tears might have been forming behind her eyes. “I’m not going to let myself be that person. I just won’t.”
I stared at her for a long second. There was a big part of me that wanted to walk over and hug the girl, to wrap her up and tell her all of this would be okay. After all, she was the only one of the three who didn’t hate the damned sight of me.
I thought better of it. If this was Billy, if he was still alive and freaking out, would I give him a hug and tell him not to worry about things? No. I would tell him he needed to man up. I’d say that, if he didn’t get his shit together immediately, he was probably going to get himself killed, and I’d be right to do it.
Why the hell would I treat Jill any differently? She needed to get tough too. She was right. She couldn’t afford to be the kind of person who let this bother her, and I couldn’t afford to indulge it.
“Fine,” I said, trying my best to take any sympathy out of my voice. “You say you’re good, I believe you’re good. You’d better be, anyway.” I nodded. “Let’s get going.”
“I say when we get going,” Mina said, pushing me back just a little.
“And?” I asked, raised eyebrows.
“Let’s get going,” she said, her tongue clicking.
I smiled, shaking my head.
We walked for nearly half an hour, and that damned hill didn’t look to be any closer. We had lapsed into silence, with the more junior officers flanking either side and drifting far enough away that Mina and I could talk privately. Not that we had, at least before the moment I decided to break the silence.
“So, what’d you use it for?” I asked, looking over at Mina. We had been walking for nearly half an hour, and this damned hill didn’t look to be any closer. We had lapsed into silence, with the more junior officers flanking either side and drifting far enough away that Mina and I could talk privately. Not that we had.
“What?” she asked, looking over at me with a look that said I had pulled her from a deep and important thought.
“Your upgrade,” I explained. “What’d you use it for?”
“Oh.” Her eyes softened just a bit. “I don’t see where that’s any of your—”
“Pulse laser,” I said, nodding firmly.
“What?” she asked again.
“We’re in the wide open. No place to hide. No cover to take,” I said. “You want to be able to take out as many of these bastards as humanly possible in the smallest amount of time possible.” I grinned at her. “So you chose a pulse laser. Tell me I’m wrong.”
She grimaced at me, turning away. I knew I was right.
“Well, what about you?” She turned back to me. “What did you choose?”
“Me?” I chuckled. Leaning closer, I answered, “A pulse laser, of course.”
“At least we’ll be properly armed for when it happens.”
I would ask what the ‘it’ she was speaking of was, but I already knew. We weren’t moving nearly quickly enough, and we’d never make it to the top of this hill before dark. We were going to have to fight our way through the crazy.
“Are they good?” I asked, looking from Mina to the girls on either side. “I saw them fight but what we went through isn’t as bad as it gets.”
“It’s not even as bad as it’s going to get,” Mina agreed, “but yeah, they’re good. Jill takes orders better than Claire, but they’re both credits. It’s why I keep them around.”
“About that?” I asked, swallowing hard. “How is that even possible? You said that you’d given up a lot to be able to be able to cultivate and keep your own team. What on Earth did you—”
The ground started to shake under us, and we all stopped immediately. My heart sank and my body tensed as I went through the list of possibilities in my head, hoping to God that this wasn’t what I knew it was.
Claire and Jill tightening up around us as the ground continued to shake, a low rumble echoing from right underfoot.
“What is—”
“It’s one of them,” Mina said, cutting into Jill’s words. She looked directly at me as she said the next words, her eyes telling me she knew just how fucked we actually were. “It’s a sandworm.”
19
My entire body threatened to shudder as I heard Mina say that word. If there was anything more bone-chillingly terrifying than a damn sandworm, I didn’t know what it was. While fliers were the sort of things that the children of Earth filled their nightmares with, it was sandworms that soldiers like us- Marines who had seen it all and done it all- woke up thinking about in the dead of night.
They were so terrifying, so damned de
structive and dangerous, that most of our planet’s civilians didn’t even know they existed. A branch of the Acburian menace that lived underground and fed on the flesh and bone of whatever it could find, sandworms had the sort of insatiable hunger and sheer mass that could rip the ground right out from under you.
Thankfully, their sheer size made getting them to Earth and other Alliance worlds more trouble than it was worth. That, and the mindless way in which they acted, made them a threat to the bugs as well. Even the Acburians were scared to death of these sons of bitches, and as a rule, when the stuff you’re afraid of gets afraid of something, you should probably stay away from it.
We could not stay away from it though. Sandworms sensed vibrations from the surface. Our fight with the fliers and company must have been enough to put one of them on our scent, and the fact that we looked to be the only moving things for at least a mile in any direction meant the worm had no other option but to zero in on us.
Usually, I’d have been prepared for something like this. They teach you how to deal with the very unlikely event of running into a sandworm while in training. The intel on this moon told us not to worry about that though. Scientists, the smartest minds on any of Earth’s continents, assured us that these things wouldn’t be a problem, so I didn’t prepare. I didn’t look for the worst to happen, and that was my own fault. Normally, I’d have been strapped down with enough weaponry to kill anything, but even if I was, the worms were not my favorite.
“Stay still,” I said, swallowing hard and putting a hand on Jill, the woman closest to me, to settle her down.
She had freaked out a little about the filtration system and, what happened to her uncle aside, that was just a damn mask. Would she be able to keep in together in the face of the most terrifying creature any of us could have imagined?
“All of you,” I said quietly, “stay as completely still as you can. These fuckers sense vibrations. It’s how they see. If we don’t move, if we’re still enough, we might be able to convince this thing that we’re gone.”
“And if we can’t?” Claire asked from the other side of Mina.
“Then we’ll fight it,” Mina said, though I could tell from the catch in her voice that she wanted that less than I did.
Tangling with a sandworm was so dangerous, I couldn’t even think of even a handful of Marines who had done so and lived to tell about it. The last one, Major Sandra Collingsworth, had a statue up in her hometown in Texas. It didn’t showcase the worm and no one outside of the forces even knew what she'd done. The good people of Texas simply thought she was a good soldier who did good things. They didn’t know she did the impossible.
That was what it would be to face a worm out here in the open. Impossible.
“Explosives?” I asked simply, looking over at Mina and referencing the only thing had been known to kill a worm.
Their hides were so tough that nothing; not gunfire, not photon blasts, not even fire, could penetrate it. The people who had survived something like this had done so by grabbing explosives and managing to get them inside the beast, where it was vulnerable.
“No,” she answered flatly, her voice low.
“Me either,” I said, my heart dropping. “Them?” My eyes motioned to the girls.
“Nope,” Mina said. “They assured us it wasn’t necessary.”
That made sense to me. Explosives weren’t like other weaponry. They were even more combustible, so dangerous, in fact, that they couldn’t be downloaded to suits wirelessly, or even upgraded. You have to be there to physically take them and, once you had them, you had to be really damn careful. Otherwise, you’d very likely blow yourself up before the bugs even had a chance to get to you.
“Goddamn it,” I muttered as the ground shook again from beneath us. All I could think about was the worm’s gaping mouth, its rows and rows of sharpened incisors. I thought about being swallowed up by that thing, of my bones crunching under it, of my body being broken apart by gastric acids and disappearing forever into the bloodstream of a beast before what was left of me was forcibly voided underground as an indistinguishable pile of excrement.
Not exactly the Irish funeral my grandfather received.
“So we stay put,” Mina said sternly, though I couldn’t help but register the hesitation in her voice. I was getting the idea that the dark-haired woman was like me, that she liked to have a plan and then a backup plan. Standing still was a shitty plan to begin with. Getting eaten was an even worse backup plan.
As it was though, it was all we could do.
My mind started to spin as I took short, shallow breaths. Breathing deep and heavy would cause me to move more and moving more would give my position away to this thing. The only reason the sandworm hadn’t already swallowed us whole was that it was still looking for our precise position.
Sandworms weren’t fans of the daylight. It was part of the reason why they lived underground. As such, when it decided to feed during daylight hours, it did so in a ‘grab and go’ sort of way. It would swoop up, snatch what it could with its mouth, and dip back into the ground with its newly caught snack struggling futilely against its strong teeth.
At this moment, it was close to finding us which meant we had until that happened or until it got dark out here, freeing up the sandworm to move more freely.
“So, how long are we going to wait?” Claire pointed off into the distance. “Because I don’t think they’re gonna sit around and let us stand here.” I followed her finger and nearly cried out in frustration.
Charging over the hill in the distance was a group of fliers. It was more than I had ever seen together in one place before, perhaps more than anyone had ever seen in one place before. Looking at them, I knew two things: they were here to kill us, and they had probably brought the sandworm.
The bugs had set a trap for us. We knew that much to be true thanks to the chlorine cloud and nanite interference before. However, this band of fliers, bug brothers in arms, was even more blatant proof of it.
Fliers didn’t hit the ground unless they wanted to. They could kill us from the air, and the sandworm would never detect their presence here. I was the bugs had rattled the sandworm to life in addition to sending a band of the only bugs who wouldn’t also be prey for the sandworm to force our hand.
We could stay here, still as statues, and get picked off by the fliers, or we could fight against the aerial assault and, in doing so, tell the worm exactly where we were. My chest tightened as I went over our options. Death by a thousand blows or being swallowed whole. Neither sounded like a winner.
“Jesus,” Mina muttered as she presumably realized what was going on too. “We’re fucked.”
“I am,” I answered, swallowing hard.
“What?” She looked over at me, still not moving her body as the earth shook below and the fliers grew ever closer.
“Switch on telescopic vision and look at that formation.” I barely motioned over to a part of the hill tight before it tapered off into the land. I glared at it with suit-induced visual clarity. “There’s a cave in there. A small opening, and I’d bet there’s hardened ground under it. You’ll be safe from the sandworm in there. You can even wait out the night if you need to.”
“I don’t like the use of the word ‘you’ in this plan of yours,” Mina said, setting her jaw in my direction. “Putting that aside, you’re assuming we’d even make it to the cave. The instant we start moving in tandem, that thing is going to pull the ground out right from under us.” She looked down at her feet. “No thrusters, remember?”
“You won’t need them,” I said, finally chancing a deeper breath. For what I was about to do, I would need it. “I’m about to make enough noise to pull anything that cares to listen in the other direction. Annabelle, initiate sonic amplifiers and send them to my boots.”
“Sonic amplifiers? That’ll draw that monster right to you.” Mina’s eyes grew wide, and she knew. “That’s the plan, isn’t it?”
“This is your team, and
you have to lead them,” I explained, surprised and a little concerned I had to explain this part to her. She was supposed to be good, after all. “Not everyone gets to survive. You know that.”
“So, I get to be the stupid bitch who got Mark Ryder killed?” She looked at me thoughtfully. “No dice, Mark. If the Alliance looks into this at all, and we both know they’re going to be so far up my ass when you die that I’ll be able to taste it, they’ll fucking execute me.” She swallowed hard, gaze turning to her two girls. “I’ll send one of them.”
“Mina, it’s your squad.” I shook my head. “I won’t have you sacrifice them for me.”
“And neither of them are Mark fucking Ryder.” She was more pissed off than I’d ever seen her.
It was understandable because instead of letting me go and do this, she had to choose which of her girls to get killed. She was also right. If she let me go, the Alliance would never let it stand, not for a fucking second. If she ignored the protocol about saving more senior Marines over junior ones, she’d be lucky if all they did was execute her.
At least, she would be if they found out she made the decision. If I just broke rank and did what I wanted? Well, they would just have to blame me instead, and I’d be dead.
“That’s fair. Which of them is it going to be?” I asked, and as her gaze flitted back to Claire and Jill, I looked at the fliers coming toward us. We only had a few seconds to do this. It’d take longer than that for her to get one of her Marines to go on a suicide mission, and something told me that Jill was going to grab the short straw because Claire would argue. “It’s Jill, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she frowned. “You might be a knuckle-dragger, but the world is better off with you in it. Maybe it would be for her too, but you’re proven.” She looked around. She peered at either woman. “Claire, prepare to fall out and follow me on three.”
As she turned to Jill, I took off running in the opposite direction. My still-active sonic amplifiers sent vibrations thundering through the ground with each step, causing the whole world to move.
Doomed Space Marine: A Space Adventure (Bug Wars Book 1) Page 12