Extinction

-54-

There were about twenty of us holed up in a circle of ground we’d taken in the forest. I worked toward an area with lot of scattered stones on the ground. This was the first spot I’d found rocks of any kind down here in Worm land. I realized this must be natural, real Helios earth, not the compressed sawdust and worm-shit we’d dug through to get here. In this spot, the enemy would have a tougher time undermining us.

It seemed to take a very long time for Kwon’s group to press the attack. I realized, looking back, that they had their hands full. The tanks were rolling down one at a time. The nanite ‘ropes’ worked well. The tanks could glide over the rough terrain, but the downward angle was too great for them to negotiate without overbalancing in this heavy-gravity environment. I thought to myself I should have designed them lower to the ground, for more stability.

We held back the Worms with our superior firepower, but they were growing in numbers with each passing minute. It was only a matter of time until they brought in a super-worm with cannons to wipe us out, or overran us with sheer numbers.

Finally, after what seemed far longer than was reasonable, Roku had his tanks down out of the tunnel and onto the floor of the big cavern. He had the tanks extend their flanges and rolled them toward our position. Large groups of marines followed every tank, hugging the back of the machines for cover.

The Worms, seeing they were about to be outgunned, decided to go for it. They charged us from every angle, and some dug underneath, collapsing the soil under our bellies. My hand-beamer radiated heat right through my glove. Twisting, heaping bodies flopped everywhere, out numbering the strange, tree-like growths themselves. Finally, my beamer quit. My powerpack was still good, so I figured it must have been the lens. I reached for my rifle, but saw I’d lost it somewhere along the way. The thick, black cable ran down to a frayed end.

I ditched my powerpack it and drew out my knife, because about then, they were getting in close. I still had the power unit built into my suit. It was enough to run the air conditioners and the rebreather.

The man on my right suddenly sprayed blood. A fountain of it shot straight up. It was as if he’d discovered an oil gusher—a red one. He struggled, but without screaming. Maybe his throat was missing, I couldn’t tell.

The Worm that had bit him surfaced then. The whole scene reminded me of a shark attack on a swimmer that I’d seen on a documentary back home. The Worm had come up underneath the marine, finding a spot where it could break through the stones we lay on. It had taken out a big chunk of his belly.

The Worm humped up out of its hole, glistening, and tried to finish the job. I crawled over to it and worked my knife. The weapon was astoundingly sharp. The Worm’s flesh tore apart like wrapping paper. The next six slashes hacked off its head. The Worm choked out brown liquids from its maw. I wasn’t sure if it was coughing blood, salivating excitedly or spitting at us out of spite. The three of us struggled, with gruesome results, until the Worm stopped thrashing and spraying.

I turned my attention back to the battle, but saw no new targets. The enemy were in retreat. All around me, men rolled onto their backs and gasped for air. Marines shouted for medics, but we’d only had one, and he was dead. We had to take care of one another now. I took it upon myself to help the guy who lay dying beside me.

After I’d unclamped the dead Worm’s jaws from his guts, the marine ripped off his hood. He looked at me. I saw he wasn’t bothering to hold his breath. He was past caring about the poisonous atmosphere of Helios.

I let him do it. If he wanted a fresh breath before he died, who was I to deny it?

“What’s that air taste like, private?” I asked.

“Burnt pizza,” he said in a raspy voice. “And you know what else, Colonel?”

“What?”

“It’s really hot. Even down here, under all this dirt, in this gloomy hole, it’s still hot. That just seems wrong, sir.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’ll get you a squeeze bottle of water.”

I rummaged in my belly-pack, and found a bottle. But by the time I’d turned back to hand it to him, his eyes had glazed. I cursed and commandeered his weapon. I went back to firing at the retreating Worms. They were soon out of range and invisible in the strange forest.

I counted noses. I had nine effectives left. Several minutes later, Kwon rolled up behind a row of tanks.

“What’s your rush?” I asked bitterly.

“Sorry sir,” said Kwon. “You did a great job keeping the snipers off us while we brought the tanks down.”

“We kept the enemy busy all right,” I said. My tone dripped with sarcasm, but Kwon didn’t seem to catch it.

We loaded the wounded into the tanks and formed up behind them. We set off marching through the crystalline forest, breaking every frond of pink crap we saw as we went. The men had passed around the rumor that this forest was the enemy’s food-supply. They were intent on wrecking as much of it as they could. Maybe they were right, but I doubted it. Who knew? I thought about stopping them, but somehow I’d lost some of my compassion for our enemy as well.

I put two tanks on point and had my troops hustle up behind them. We didn’t drive straight for the central point, but rather spiraled in, hoping to avoid traps. We stuck to ground that looked the most solid, but that was a tough call, too. From our vantage, in the middle of a thousand crackling pieces of alien vegetation, it all looked about the same.

Up ahead, I didn’t really see anything special about the area that we were targeting. Could this be it? I dared to hope. Maybe the Macros had just wanted us to get this far, into the heart of the enemy. I wondered if they had just chosen the midpoint of the Worm mound and sent us here, figuring that if we made it this far, we must have done the enemy a lot of damage.

Kwon was having similar thoughts. “What are we doing here, sir?”

“I don’t know. It looks different than the rest of this termite mound. Maybe this spot is some kind of shrine?”

Kwon snapped his fingers. I wasn’t sure how he managed to do it through his gloves. He pointed at me. “Yeah. That’s it. This is some kind of shrine. We are in a big, Worm sacred-place. A graveyard for heroes.”

“I thought their graveyard was outside,” I said.

“I bet they worship their gods here.”

“Could be,” I said.

“Maybe this explains why the Macros had us come here,” said Kwon. “Maybe this is some kind of holy place for them.”

Or maybe the Macros had no idea what’s down here, I thought. Maybe the machines just wanted us to drive our way to the center of this hellish mound, because it was big and in their way. I kept these thoughts to myself, however. It wouldn’t do my men any good to hear them. Troops needed a specific goal to keep them going.

We pressed the Worm defenders back, meeting only skirmishers. But we could tell they were building up for something big, gathering their strength. I came to appreciate that most of the Worms that had once lived in this vast place had to be dead. We’d seen millions of bodies buried outside, but only met thousands in the heart of the place. I wondered how many Worms could live in a place like this, a vast nest, if it were fully populated.

We reached a slope that went upward, and when we topped the rise, we met a surprise. It wasn’t the surprise I’d been expecting—namely about fifty thousand pissed Worms. Instead, it was a depression of sorts, a bowl formed in the middle of the mountain. We were very close to the spot my maps told me the Macros wanted us to reach. Looking down the slope into the center of that dish of earth, the answer was very plain.

A ring sat there. A ring that was smaller, much smaller, than the ones I’d seen before. It was probably only two hundred yards wide. Half of it was sunk down into the earth. Looking at it, I suspected it had been buried, or had been constructed bit by bit from the bottom up.

There were Worms crawling over the ring and around it. The device was clearly made of the same sort of material the others I’d seen were made of. I hoped I would have time to study it, the information could be invaluable to our own nerds back home.

“Flip on every suit recorder we have,” I ordered. “Roku, order your tanks to scan that thing continuously, and store the feed. I want every brainbox we have to bring home a record of it.”

Seeing us, Worms began humping, crawling from all sides of the ring. They dropped the last dozen feet to the floor of the place and squirmed away. My men fired down on them, burning them as they ran. I ordered them to stop, as the enemy was unarmed.

“Where the hell are the Worm troops?” asked Kwon at my side.

“More importantly,” I said, “how did the Worms get a ring down here?”

“Maybe they found it, and built this mound over it. Maybe it is their god.”

I huffed. “I think the Macros fear this ring. The Worms have a plan, and the Macros sent us down here to stop them. Maybe this thing will transport a Worm army to the Macro homeworld. Maybe it will let them push their nuclear mines through to blast the Macros.”

“Let’s take it and find out,” Kwon suggested.

I nodded. “Company Alpha swing left, Echo right. I want one tank leading each group. The rest advance toward the artifact. Fire only if fired upon. If they are surrendering and in retreat, maybe we can finish this without further bloodshed.”

I figured I was dreaming when I described this final step as a cakewalk. But the Worms still managed to surprise me.