“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.”