Extinction

-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.”

“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.