Extinction

-45-

The Worms hadn’t given up. They were hard at work underneath us, tunneling deeply.

“There’s something big, sir. Metallic,” Captain Sarin told me, flipping images on the screen. “It’s about a thousand feet down in a soil substrate. I think the ground there is softer, maybe easier to dig through.”

The big screen showed crawling, finger-like traces heading in our direction. They had converged and were aiming directly toward our position. I stared at them in growing concern. It was obvious where the tunnels had come from. Tracing backward from its current location led directly to the huge mountain.

“We’ll keep an eye on things, sir,” said Major Robinson. “At this rate, the Worms won’t be under us for hours.”

I continued to stare at the screen, not saying anything. I didn’t like this new, gathering assault.

Behind me, a small, strong hand plucked at the staples holding together my injuries. I knew it was Sandra, letting me know she wanted me to come to our quarters with her and take a break. She wanted me out of the command post and under her not-so-gentle care. But she wouldn’t speak, I knew that too. She had no official capacity here, and knew enough not to interrupt a command discussion.

I turned to her and tried to smile. I think I failed. She frowned back. She could tell immediately I wasn’t going to do what she wanted. “Sandra, thanks for the field-dressing. Excellent work as always. Could you return to your post in my office now?”

Sandra nodded, but gave me a small, pursed-mouth glare. She didn’t bother to help me pull up my suit and help me reseal it. She turned around without a word and left. The spring-loaded door prevented her from slamming it behind her. I watched her shapely form exit—somehow, when she was angry, she managed to look even hotter.

The command staff tried not to appear embarrassed as she left and I stared after her. The whole thing was unprofessional, but I hardly cared. Dying in a firefight with alien Worms on a newly discovered planet—all in the name of service to machine overlords—didn’t fit the norm, either. We made our own rules in my outfit. I pressed my own suit into place, activating the nanites via proximity so they linked up and sealed the fabric.

Once she was gone, I turned to my officers and tapped on the screen where the contact blinked. The tapping caused it to zoom in closer. There was no more detail to be seen, however. Only a wireframe cube drawn in warning yellow.

“What if this is one of their thermonuclear mines?” I asked, voicing the thought that had been on my mind the entire time.

“They haven’t hit us with anything big like that yet,” Robinson argued. “I figured maybe they don’t want to set off a big radiation mess right here so close to their stronghold.”

“Yeah, but maybe we just changed their plans for them. Maybe after we skunked their assault team, they’ve decided they will just have to live with a little radiation.”

Robinson sighed. “It could be, sir. I don’t like any of this. We’ve yet to gain the initiative on this mission. We’ve been reacting to enemy attacks since we entered the system.”

“Well, let’s change that. Send out hovertanks with sensor arrays hugging the dirt. I want to see everything that’s underground between us and this advancing force. Have the tanks stop, turning off every system except the sensors and then set them active. Ping away at the enemy. When the tanks detect something, they can relay the findings.”

Robinson didn’t follow my orders immediately. Instead, he stared at me in concern. “We’ve already lost a quarter of our hovertanks, sir, and they are the units that did the most damage in the last battle.”

“I don’t care. The enemy won’t find our tanks easy to sneak up on with their sensors active and directed downward. These Worms won’t come at us in the air or over the land. They will dig to us. That’s how they operate. If we can see them coming, we’ll have the advantage. We can move over the surface faster than they can maneuver underground.”

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.