Extinction

-53-

It was the loose soil that got us into trouble. Anyone who’s ever tried to dig a hole on the beach knows the story: the sandy walls cave in on the sides of the hole, filling the bottom. We’d been drilling along, making our tunnel and hardening up the walls with the heat of our lasers. We were creating a tube-like structure of stiffer material as we went through the mountain. But when we reached an end-point, a spot where the light dirt had somewhere to go when we drove into it, the dirt fell away from our tunnel in a rapid, sloughing motion. Our tunnel and its glassy walls were exposed to open space. The ceiling cracked and earth poured in. The dirt below us shifted too, and sent us down into the void we’d reached. The dirt above came down after it, pelting us. Within seconds after I’d called the halt, my forward team found itself helplessly sliding down into a pile of soft earth, tumbling at a forty-five degree angle a hundred feet or more downward.

I went down with the rest of them, trying to bodysurf and failing at it. I went under, and dirt buried me. I reached up with my hands as I realized I was being buried alive, trying to keep them up and visible. I wondered, as the dirt first roared, then finally pattered over my head, if my suit would keep me alive for days, and if I would ever be found and dug out. Something heavy hit my hand, cracking my fingers. I winced, hoping another drill-tank hadn’t just rolled over my hand. I wiggled my fingers experimentally, they hurt, but I thought they were all responding to my brain’s commands.

I tried to operate my com-link with my chin, but it didn’t work. I had no way of trouble-shooting it. Maybe the unit had been ripped loose during the fall. Life-giving air still hissed out of the rebreather into my suit, however.

Something grabbed my fingers after I’d spent about a minute down there. Something that pinched horribly, pulling them out of their sockets. I would have pulled them back under the ground, if I could. The pinch stopped, for a blessed moment. I felt the walls pressing in on me, suffocating me with the weight. Many people who died in avalanches died because the pressure compressed their lungs and would not allow them to breathe, even if there was an air pocket available. Here on Helios, with the nearly double gravity to contend with, the earth weighed a lot and my lungs labored to suck in each gulp of air.

There was a fluttering sensation around my upraised glove. Was that a Worm? Were they rooting around up there, looking for good morsels amongst my men? The sensation of movement around my exposed hand increased, and for a moment, I wished I’d never put it up there, like a flag on a sand castle.

Another crushing grip closed over my hand. Wrenching force was applied. I felt my shoulder give first. It slipped out of the socket, and I screamed in my enclosed suit, the sound of my cries was muffled inside my crumpled hood. It sounded as if I were screaming underwater.

I squeezed whatever had me and held on. I was hauled out of the dirt like a carrot, dribbling brown earth everywhere. When I was half-exposed the horrible ripping sensation stopped. My arm flopped down at my side. I used my other hand to smear dirt from my goggles.

I was still buried up to my waist. Standing over me was Kwon. He had both hands on his rifle now. He was twisting this way and that, shouting something. My com-link still didn’t work, and I couldn’t make out what he was talking about.

Then the autoshades triggered as light-weight beamers flared around me. The men were firing at something. Painfully, I extracted myself from my early grave and got to my feet.

Kwon looked me over. He reached toward my head with those thick, ungentle fingers. I flinched, but let him do it. He fumbled with something near my ear. I heard a click, and suddenly my head filled with sound. My com-link had become disconnected in the fall.

“—we’ve got at least thirty down, Sergeant,” I heard someone say.

“Worms north and east. They are staying in the growths.”

“—sniping at us!”

I looked around, staggering, holding my wrenched shoulder. I tried to take stock of things. Men were everywhere on the slope, nearly a hundred of them. There wasn’t much cover, but we were in a depression of sorts, and if the Worms were to the north and east, they didn’t have a good firing position on us. My own men, I realized, were up on the rim of the mound formed by the landslide. They were the ones firing back at the snipers. Others worked to scrape out a trench for cover.

We were near the bottom of a fantastically large cavern. The ceiling appeared to be a thousand feet up in the gloomy distance. The floor of the cavern was covered with growths, things that looked like rubbery, slimy crystalline formations. I could tell by their flower-like structures were living growths, not some kind of mineral deposit. They reminded me of large fans of coral. It was as if I looked out into a drained undersea grotto.

I looked upslope. I could see the broken mouth of the tunnel. My men poked out with their lasers, looking down at us. No one seemed to be in charge.

I looked down slope. Tumbling wasn’t good for tanks, I thought. One of the two drill-tanks I’d had leading the way had landed nose-down at the bottom of the slope. I could tell by the trail of dead, flattened marines that led down to its resting place, the machine had taken a few men down with it. The second drill-tank had fared better, it was upright and the torn skin of it was slowly reshaping itself. That meant the brainbox was still intact. The gun didn’t have enough range when configured for drilling to hit the snipers. If the Worms tried to rush us, however, that tank would be a powerful defense.

I shook my head and tried to think. “Riggs here. Anyone got a fix on the snipers?” I asked on the operational channel.

A few men cheered. “Good to hear you made it, sir,” said a familiar voice. I glanced down at the HUD readout. It was Captain Roku.

“Captain? Did our lead pilot make it?”

“No sir. That slide down the hill killed a number of good men.”

“All right,” I said, “Roku, you are in command of the remaining hovertanks. You are now second in command of this expedition.”

“Ah, yes Colonel,” said Roku, surprised.

He shouldn’t be, I thought, he was next in rank. There were two other captains in the infantry, and they may or may not be senior, but I wanted one of my pilots in the lead if I didn’t manage to dig my way out of the next hole I fell into. Knowing the chain of command was critical in a place like this, where deaths could alter the face of things at any moment.

“Captain, can you get your tanks down here with us safely?”

“With time, sir,” he said. “We we can drill down in a spiral to your level and come out nearby, safely.”

Kwon waved to me, pointing out toward the floor of the cavern. My vision had adjusted somewhat. The coral-like growths occasionally puffed smoke. The enemy was hiding out there, like crawling snipers in a forest. They were moving around on the open floor of the cavern to flank us. If they kept moving, they would soon have a clear shot at my men, with no cover between us and the incoming fire.

“Explain your current situation, Captain,” I said. As I spoke, sniper fire spanged off a nearby dead marine’s reactor unit. I wasn’t surprised, the Worms tended to shoot dead bodies. They didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between a live man and a dead one. I ducked down to avoid further fire, and Kwon knelt beside me.

“I’ve backed the tanks down the tunnels about a hundred yards,” said Roku in the calm voice of a man who sat confidently in his tank. “The last cave-in was caused by the combined weight of the two forward drill-tanks. If we drilled down and around—”

“Forget that, Captain,” I said, cutting him off. “That will take an hour or more. We’ve been exposed to the enemy. They are already on the move, and more of them will gather every minute. Soon, they will probably hit you from behind up in that tunnel and assault us frontally in this ditch we’ve dug for ourselves down here. Somewhere in the middle of this cavern is our target. I need your tanks and men down here pronto, to help us finish this thing.”

“Sir? How do I do that, sir?” he asked.

“You’ll figure a way, Roku. I can’t micromanage what I can’t see.”

“What if I can’t do it, sir?”

“Then I’ll be calling you Lieutenant from now on,” I said. “I’ll get my marines out of your path and take some cover in that coral forest looking mess on the cavern floor. We’ll give the snipers something to think about while you get your asses down here. You have ten minutes. Riggs out.”

I thought I heard him mutter something about Riggs’ Pigs before he disconnected. I smiled, and slapped Kwon with my good arm.

“Thanks for pulling me out of there. I’m not sure I could have done the same for you.”

“But you would have tried,” Kwon said.

I nodded and crawled to the top of the trench line. Dirt popped twice around me, the snipers were getting testy. I ducked back down. “Let’s get some suppression fire on those marked sniper positions. We’ve got about fifty men down here. I’ll take the first half down to the forest. You cover me.”

Kwon nodded. He turned toward the men we could see hunkering up in the tunnel mouth. As yet, none of them had moved. Whatever Captain Roku had in mind, I hoped he would get a move on.

“Listen up!” Kwon boomed up at them, dialing up his external directional speakers to an ear-splitting level. “Suppress those frigging snipers, NOW!”

“Well done,” I said, gathering up a platoon’s worth of marines. Their officer and the company’s second sergeant had been buried along with a number of others. I went from man to man, tapping every other one and jerking my thumb. Soon, I had a pack of them following me.

My left arm burned and tingled now. I knew from too much experience that it would start working again soon. The nanites were almost magical, but they had a terrible bedside manner. They never cared much about the patient. Sometimes, they might build the nerve endings last, or cut them during the healing process. Other times, a marine might suffer in agony for a long while before an injury was healed. As part of their symbiotic relationship, they were capable of cutting nerve-damaged areas to prevent pain from becoming overwhelming and causing a marine to thus become ineffective, but it didn’t always happen that way. When they were healing a man, they repaired whatever was the most expedient portion of flesh first. Every man hoped they did the nerves last, but it was a matter of luck, really.

I took my team down to the site of the wrecked drill-tank first. I stepped on something hard that was buried under the tank. I reached down and smeared away a mass of dirt. I found the sensor array that Jensen had dragged down the tunnel with him. I eyed the cracked screen. I hissed in anger. He had dialed down the range to the minimum.

Moving around the base of the tank in a crouch, I found Corporal Jensen next. He’d been right up there with the tank, and it wasn’t surprising he’d gone down with it. Half his head was missing. Lucky bastard, I thought. Now, I wouldn’t get the chance to ream him for having disobeyed orders and leading us into this mess. If he hadn’t been so worried about another giant Worm, he might not have taken those last few steps out into open space.

When we were gathered in the shelter of the wrecked tank, I realized we were never going to make it to the corral forest on foot. It was more than a hundred yards of open ground away, and the enemy fire was increasing by the minute, cover or no. Overhead, lasers flashed into the forest and Worm rifles puffed back. Sometimes a Worm thrashed in the coral-looking stuff, flipping and burning. Sometimes one of my marines pitched back, screaming. But they had us pretty well pinned down.

“Captain Roku!” I shouted into my command channel. “What do you have for me?”

“We’ve got a plan, sir.”

“Talk to me.”

“We’ll roll each tank out of the tunnel with a rope—a nanite rope—attached to it. With our marines and another tank holding onto it, we should keep the momentum down to a slow roll. I should have the first tank down there in another few minutes.”

I nodded to myself. He wasn’t going to get down here within ten minutes. In fact, it sounded like it would be closer to half an hour. But I doubted he could do any better. “Okay, do it. But what is the state of this tank down here? Is your pilot alive in there?”

“Yes sir, he’s injured, compound leg fracture. But you don’t really need your legs as a tanker.”

“Good point. Name?”

“Warrant Officer Sloan, sir.”

I opened a private channel with Sloan. “Can you run your machine, Sloan?”

“Yes sir, but the enemy are out of range at the moment—”

“I don’t want you to shoot. I want you to throw out your flanges. I want you to head right toward the forest and let us get behind you. Take us right into the forest.”

“I’m on it, sir.”

Within a minute, Sloan managed to glide his tank forward. I watched it transform, puffing up around the forward section like a cobra puffing up its hood. The tank listed noticeably to the right. I could tell his gravity-repellors on that side were shot, but he could still drive it. I ran behind the tank, and my troops followed me. This maneuver we’d practiced hundreds of times back home. First employed by the Germans in World War II, this tactical maneuver provided moving cover for infantry on an open battlefield. We hugged the spread shields of the slowly rolling tank, using the cover from enemy fire to the front. When we reached the enemy lines, we would spread out and mop up. As long as the enemy didn’t have any heavy weaponry of their own, or outflank us, we should be able to take them out.

The first fifty yards went well. It was about then, I think, that the Worms realized what we were doing. They stopped firing at the tank, which was immune to their small arms. They began to dig instead.

“Watch for Worms,” I said. “They might dig under our feet.”

The big gun on the tank spoke then, flaring up with a tremendous glow of heat. Swathes of coral-like growth blackened and curled. Worms caught by the fantastic heat and power of the big, short-range cannon exploded into vapor and twisted remains. It was as if we’d applied a blow torch to a squirming nest of maggots.

When we were very near the coral forest line, we learned what the enemy had been up to. They’d dug tunnels in the earth in our path, right below the surface. When our tank glided over one of them, it collapsed and the right side of the vehicle sank down with a sudden, sickening lurch. The brainbox was inexperienced in actual combat. The stabilizers whined, overloaded. Like a panicked animal, the tank thrashed and overcompensated, trying to lift itself upward. As it was already weak on the right side, applying more thrust caused the entire tank to heel over onto its side. The big gun, still firing, exploded upon contact with the surface.

“That’s our cue, boys! Scatter and advance!” I screamed.

I led by example, charging toward the corral forest past the burning wreckage of the drill-tank. Feet pounded behind me, but I didn’t bother to look to see who followed and who didn’t. A few men were sucked under by greedy Worms, who squirmed in the soft soil beneath us.

I drew out my hand-beamer, and burned anything that looked remotely dangerous. I let my rifle dangle, as my injured arm wasn’t ready to handle it yet. My goggles flared and darkened in strobing, confusing pulses, dark-light-dark, as men fired around me. The goggles prevented blindness, but the effect was still disconcerting upon the mind.

The moment I reached the corral forest, I threw myself on my belly. I landed painfully on my damaged arm, which didn’t quite cooperate and flopped down ahead and under my body. I sucked in a breath and let it out as a hiss, suppressing a scream.

Still hissing, I squirmed on my belly, like one of the Worm troops. When I had reached a decently covered spot, I chinned my com-link and called for Kwon to advance with his squad as soon as he was able. We needed a position staked out in the forest before the enemy could surround us.

“Push ‘em back, men,” I told those that joined me in our burning crystalline forest. “Everyone get under cover and burn everything that squirms.”

I looked back at the ground between the wrecked tank and the forest line. I counted six dead marines and I mentally added Warrant Officer Sloan to the list. But then the tanker came crawling over and tapped my leg.

I grunted in surprise. “How the hell did you get out of there, Sloan?”

“These tanks can practically run themselves you know, sir.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking back at the burning tank. I knew all about scripts for Nano machines. Obviously, Sloan had given the vehicle its instructions, then slipped out the back and followed his own tank on foot with the rest of us. I thought about reprimanding him for abandoning his post, but really, it had turned out to be pretty good thinking on his part.