Extinction sf-2

by B. V. Larson

  “Focus on the gunners,” I told my men. I aimed my beamer down and fired. A Worm blackened and twisted in a death coil. I’d gotten lucky. I could have just have easily hit one of my own men-if any of them had survived this long.

  I turned to Kwon. “We’re trapped at this end of the tunnel. We might as well join in the mess down there.”

  He hesitated, but only for a half-second. His big head dipped. “I’ve always hated worms, sir,” he said, and slid downward into the madness below us, roaring.

  I bared my teeth and followed him. More men and boots rained down behind me.

  I found myself on my hands and knees in a mass of soft earth. It was like mud-wrestling down there. I pulled out my knife, letting my rifle dangle. I slashed at anything Worm-like and crawled out of the way.

  I got to my feet when I could and glimpsed a new kind of Hell.

  — 47-

  There was more room down here than I’d expected. The Worms had been busy. They’d carved out a horizontal space in each direction-or maybe the region was a natural gap, a cave in the layers of rock and earth. I couldn’t tell which right now, and I didn’t much care.

  I moved toward a wall. There was less confusion there, and the odds of being hit by my own men firing down from above was less.

  “Form up against this rock wall, men!” I shouted.

  A few of them heard me and put their butts against the wall. Occasionally, a Worm rushed us and we burned it down.

  “Don’t trust your footing,” I shouted. “There may be more traps-more layers below us. Turn your beams into the larger area of the cavern and fire at anything that squirms.”

  I took my own advice, peering through the dust, confusion and darkness. Columns of earth stood everywhere, blocking a clear line of fire, but I managed to squeeze off a shot every so often. The men around me did the same. Collectively, we stemmed the tide of Worms that rushed forward to kill the men who still struggled in knots in the pit. Twisted limbs, corpses and dirt choked the collapsed area.

  It didn’t take long for the Worms to notice their new, organized attackers on their flank. They formed up a unit of their own and pressed forward, about twenty of them. They reared up and let their chattering guns stream fire into my group. We had no cover, and I directed my men to advance and hug columns in groups of three.

  Both sides were exchanging fire at close range now, about a dozen yards apart. On each side, troops momentarily revealed themselves, fired and ducked back. Sometimes, the incoming fire from the other side overwhelmed one of my men. Two went down in less than a minute, then a third slumped, his head missing.

  I activated my com-link. “Forget about radio silence. Everyone down here knows the score, this is a pitched battle. If you are up top, I’m talking to you now. I want the last Sergeant in line to stay up there with three fireteams. Keep sniping down into that hole and keep them off our wounded. The rest of you, come down. We’ll provide covering fire. Move north into the columns and hug the walls.”

  I signaled my remaining men. There were less than a dozen who could fight. “When they start sliding down, we all cover them with everything we’ve got. No grenades, though. I don’t want this ceiling collapsing on us.”

  It wasn’t long before more boots came sliding down with men behind them. My men roared around us and we all came out of cover at once, firing at the Worms.

  The enemy recoiled, then returned fire. I was hit with a half-dozen exploding balls, and my left side was numb afterward. I drew my hand beamer and burned Wormflesh wherever it showed itself.

  The men sliding down came in ever growing numbers. They picked themselves up, advanced and soon we had two fronts for the Worm ambushers. After another minute or two of fighting, the last of them died or retreated down black holes in the floor.

  They’d killed half my men, and we’d never seen a sign of the bomb they supposedly carried. Maybe the whole thing had been a feint. At the moment, I found it hard to think. I panted and tried to push ribs back into my skin by kneading them through my suit.

  “Sir, we’ve lost contact with the forward fireteam and Robinson’s Company Three,” said Kwon, hulking over me. “I think the Worms were waiting for us, sir.”

  “No shit,” I said.

  “Why didn’t we see them? With our scanners I mean, sir?”

  I paused for a second, wishing I could scratch my face. It itched with sweat and droplets ran down from my buzzcut into my eyes to sting them. “I think we were only detecting the metal in their machines-their drilling sleds. I guess when their infantry digs, we can’t see them. Either that, or these tunnels were all here already, and they just slithered underneath us and dug until the soil was weak enough that it collapsed.”

  “So, they could ambush us again? Anywhere?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much,” I said. I crouched down on my heels. The idea of sliding down deeper into the depths of Helios didn’t fill me with confidence. It made me want to walk in a crouch and feel every step of the way.

  “Orders, sir?” Kwon asked.

  I tried to think for a second. “Send one scout down each of these tunnels. They are only to go about a hundred yards out, then come back and tell us what they find. If they make contact with the enemy, they are to retreat immediately.”

  Kwon stared at me. “Should we maybe try to use ropes to get back up to the main tunnel, sir?”

  “No. The Worms and their bomb are below us, not above us. We’re going to take them out.”

  Kwon straightened and shouted for volunteers. He slapped the nearest four men who didn’t stumble away fast enough. These volunteers separated and headed for the darkest, narrowest Worm-tunnels we’d seen yet.

  Two of the volunteers never came back. One did with a Worm on his tail. We hammered the monster down with a dozen shafts of hot energy. The last man crawled back a full six minutes after we’d sent him down.

  “There’s a bigger tunnel down there, sir,” he told me.

  “Did you see any Worms?”

  “No, but they are around. I could hear them. It sounded like they were driving a tractor or something.”

  Kwon and I eyed one another. “Show us the way,” I told the scout. We followed him back down a narrow shaft into utter darkness.

  The shaft ended as a hole in the roof of a much larger Worm tunnel. This one was horizontal and the ribs of earth on the floor and walls were thicker, as if a giant Worm had made it. Perhaps it had.

  We gathered in the tunnel and counted noses. I had about sixty effectives left. I got out a computer and did some triangulating. According to my best calculations, this tunnel led from our base directly under the Worm mountain. I turned and headed in the direction of our base.

  “What if the Worms are in the other direction, sir?” asked Kwon.

  “I hope they are behind us. I hope they light off their nuke now, this far from our base. Then they won’t kill everyone-just us,” I said.

  “Very reassuring, sir.”

  “That’s what I’m here for, Sergeant.”

  We trotted down the tunnel, making good time. We figured out five minutes later that we’d guessed right. When we caught up to the enemy, I think the Worms were more surprised to see us than we were to see them. We came up right behind them without them sensing us, because they were driving a sled the size of a diesel truck and it made a lot of noise.

  “Grenades first, then we beam them until nothing moves,” I told my troops.

  “Won’t that set off the nuke?” asked Kwon.

  “No, at least not in an effective way. If we light the explosive shell around the warhead’s nucleus, it should cause an explosion, but the compression from the explosion won’t be evenly distributed enough to cause critical mass.”

  Kwon said something else, I think, but I was already winding up with a grenade. I threw it-but didn’t quite land it under the big sled. It hit the ceiling and bounced down under some Worm tails that slithered along in the rear of the formation. Other grenades flew after mine, and
then the tunnel rippled with concussive explosions.

  I didn’t wait until I could hear or see right again. I had my rifle up in my functional arm and I squeezed off one-second bursts, firing at the big drilling sled where I figured I might do the most damage. I marched forward as I fired and a pack of marines advanced with me. Everyone on the front line was blazing and it felt good to be tearing them up for once.

  We killed every Worm and their machine without a loss. It felt good to win one cleanly. I noticed that most of these Worms were different, as we picked over the bodies. They were smaller, and had different tattooed symbols on their skins. Were they females? Civilians? Scientists or sappers? I didn’t know, and I barely cared. We’d stopped them.

  We found the device, riding in the center of the machine. I counted myself lucky they hadn’t thought to set it up with a dead man’s switch. I had no idea what the yield was, but I was sure I was looking at enough kilotons to take out our base.

  We slagged the box-like device with our beamers until radiation registered on our suit warning-meters. We all got a dose, but our suits stopped most of it. I knew from experience that radiation poisoning was like getting the flu when you had a body full of nanites to rebuild the tiny holes the subatomic particles blew through your cells. We’d live.

  — 48-

  Finding our way out to the surface wasn’t easy. About half-way up, we met with a rescue effort, which came in a strange form. A silver thread of nanites, like a mercury rope, trickled down to us from above. I connected my com-link to it with an accessory cable, and was rudely surprised when the com-link blew up in my face. A wisp of blue smoke drifted in the dark Worm-tunnel.

  “Gah!” said Kwon, backing away. “Did they take our base, sir?”

  I looked at him. “What?”

  “The nanites. They’ve turned on us.”

  “No, no,” I said, pulling out my suit’s power cable and plugging it into the nanite stream. The liquid metal rippled as I pushed copper prongs into it. The nanites had a gelatinous consistency. “This is a power line. I tried to plug my com unit into it like an idiot.”

  Kwon watched dubiously. “How do those things keep the positive from the negative? And how do they not ground out when they touch the earth?”

  I shrugged in my suit. The crinkling fabric rustled. “They seem to form tubes of conductive nanites sheathed by others with a non-conductive coating,” I explained. “As far as we can figure out, they detect which prongs of an intruding plug need current, then reshape the tubes of conductive nanites into the right configuration.”

  The men around me hunkered closer. Several drew out their suit docking cables.

  I smiled at them. “I can tell some of you boys are getting low. Who is down to a quarter charge or less?” I asked.

  About ten men raised their arms. “Okay, you are first up. Ten of us shouldn’t draw too much. Just ten now, I don’t want to overload the stream.”

  We all gathered along the nanite stream, like hunters clustering around a fire. Our suits had fusion reactors, but they need fuel, fresh nanites and a full battery-charge. This nanite stream provided all of the above.

  I slapped a PFC who hadn’t needed to recharge yet and gestured for him to hand over his com-link. He did so reluctantly. “Private, find yourself another com-link on a dead marine.”

  He looked down the tunnel behind us, doubtfully. “Do I have to go all the way back down there alone, sir?”

  “Of course not. I just gave you permission to rob the next man who dies. Think of it as your inheritance.”

  “Thank you, sir…” the PFC said doubtfully.

  I took the new com-link and configured it to transmit over the power-line. It took a few minutes and was scratchy, but I finally got through to the command post. I was relieved and a bit surprised when Major Robinson answered.

  “Kyle?” he said, sounding even more surprised than I was to hear him. “Colonel Riggs?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re still breathing.”

  “Unbelievable. About a dozen of your men came back out of the tunnels, saying you’d vanished with most of your troops into an underground trap.”

  I thought about ordering the men to be arrested for desertion, but decided to forget about it. I could understand that some of my marines had panicked and retreated back up that tunnel. Maybe their Sergeant had ordered them to withdraw to the surface. If I’d been on their side of the collapsed tunnel, I might have given the order myself. In the confusion, it was hard to tell if anyone was going to get out of there alive.

  “We did fall into a trap. But we reversed things on the Worms and managed to find the device.”

  “You took it out?” he asked.

  “Yes. But we’re low on power, oxygen and radiation pills. We need to get out of here.”

  He was quiet for a second. “You just had to go down there yourself, didn’t you, Riggs?”

  I grinned and snorted inside my hood. “Someone had to do it. You were in the wrong tunnel. How did you get out so fast anyway, Major?”

  “There was no party down there. The Worms went the other way, as you said. When you made contact, Captain Sarin got a message down to us that we had staked out the wrong tunnel. I got back to the surface and spent the rest of the time trying to figure out what happened to you.”

  “Are there any more incursions? Ones that we can detect, I mean?”

  “No, not at the moment. If the Worms are up to something, they are being quiet about it.”

  “All right. Get me out of here, Major. I think we might have the initiative for the first time in this campaign. I don’t intend to let a pack of invertebrates get the jump on me again.”

  It took several hours, but we managed to follow the silver trail of nanites up to the surface. We met with various rescue troopers along the way. We never found anyone from the company Robinson had sent down here ahead of my group. I hoped they weren’t captured or lost and screaming down underneath us somewhere in the dark.

  It was day outside, and the huge, red sun was glaring down on everything. My porthole-like goggles were blacked out due to the autoshading effect. As soon as I came out of the tunnel and walked to the perimeter of the camp, I was greeted by a smaller marine in a suit. As I got closer, I saw the feminine form through the bulky shape of the suit.

  “Captain Sarin?” I said.

  She walked up to me and took a swing at me. Her fist came up with shocking speed. I was surprised, but not enough to let her land the punch. I caught her wrist. Her other hand came up next, and I caught that one too.

  “You bastard!” she breathed.

  “I didn’t know you cared so much, Captain Sarin,” I said, grunting as I struggled with her. I watched her boots closely. She looked as if she might kick me, and I was all out of hands.

  “It’s me, Sandra, you idiot,” she said. She wrenched her hands away from me, breaking the grip I had on her wrists.

  “I know,” I said. I sensed this was a bad time to laugh.

  Sandra took two steps away, turned her back on me and hugged herself with her arms. I stood behind her, wondering if I should keep walking into the base. I needed a shower. Men tramped by us out of the tunnels in a steady stream, tired but amused. They stared and slapped one another, pointing out the scene to anyone who might have missed the action. There wasn’t much privacy on an extra-solar expedition like this.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “You snuck out on me, that’s what.”

  “I’ve got responsibilities. You have to understand you can’t come first. Not out here,” I said. I started walking then, right past her. I entered the camp, squeezing between two bricks. There was a pool of shade there and the cool gloom of the spot felt momentarily good.

  “Where are you going?” asked Sandra from behind me. I realized she had followed me.

  “I need a shower,” I said.

  “What are you going to do after that?”

  “Count our dead. Plan our next battle.”<
br />
  “Do you need any company in that shower?”

  I thought about it. I didn’t look at her. “I don’t know. It’s a pretty small shower.”

  Sandra kicked me then, in the rear. I laughed finally, reached back and grabbed her boot. Sandra was good with a gun and okay with a knife, but she wasn’t so good at hand-to-hand. I levered her up and over. She did a flip and landed hard on her face in the dirt. I knew that fall had to hurt, nanites or not. A falling body sped up much more rapidly on Helios. The planet’s gravity had a way of grabbing you and slamming you down when you fell. Tripping and falling on your face felt like you’d jumped off a roof. I helped her up, still laughing.

  “Get your hands off me,” she growled.

  I thought about letting her fall on her face again, but didn’t want to push things too far. I probably already had.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked.

  “You mean, why did I let you kick me in the ass?”

  “No, I mean-” she broke off. “I was just so worried, Kyle. I hate the feeling-you know that. You snuck out on me. You should have told me you were going to go fight Worms at the bottom of some hole. For hours, I thought you were dead. Did you know that? For hours.”

  “I thought I was dead, too,” I said.

  Sandra trudged beside me, brooding. I was relieved when she stopped talking and didn’t give me a longer lecture. That was one thing about her I appreciated. She was a very physical girl. If you pissed her off, she didn’t make a speech-but you might have to duck.

  “If you ever flip me again, you’ll wake up without any hair,” she said.

  “Better count your fingers first. I bite.”

  When we got back to the command brick and to our shared quarters, I stripped down and climbed into the shower cubicle. It was one of the few units in the entire base that wasn’t publicly shared. Rank had its privileges.

  About half-way through, when the cubicle was nicely steamed-up, Sandra joined me. She didn’t talk at all. Her body was firm and insistent. The cubicle was really too small for that sort of thing-but we made do.