Nothing happened to my scouts, so the rest followed. I was in the middle of the column. As the cavern blocked the big red sun of the surface world from view, I found that I missed it. The tunnel walls were about a hundred feet apart and were ribbed, like the smaller tunnels we’d found near our base, but on a much grander scale. The huge tunnel could have held a train, and I was reminded of the Atlanta subway system, much of which is carved from solid rock.
We marched forward into the gloom. Soon, we had to switch on our suit lights and every man had his light beam-rifle in his hand and at the ready. No one looked happy to be here.
“Kwon,” I said, speaking on a private channel.
“Sir!” he said, hustling up in the long line to march at my side.
I’d put Kwon in the unit I marched with. I could have ridden inside one of the drilling machines, but I wanted to see and hear what my troops did. I didn’t believe in leadership from air-conditioned comfort. Especially not when walking into a den of traps.
“What do you think we should do, Kwon?” I asked the Sergeant.
“Sir?”
“Just tell me.”
“We march into the heart of this mountain and kill whatever we find, then go home.”
“Clearly stated, Sergeant,” I said. “Do you think following these tunnels is going to work out for us?”
“No sir. The Worms will dig underneath us and trap us. Just as they did before.”
I nodded. “Column, halt!” I ordered.
Everyone looked surprised. The drill-tanks glided forward another few paces, then stopped. Their nosecones twitched from side to side. It was an affectation of their past designs. They still sought distant targets, even though they had very limited range now. I hadn’t had time to rewrite all their scripting.
We were close to taking the first big bend in the route, which would swing us to the east. I looked back down the tunnel behind me. Out there, in the red glare of the sun, things looked a lot safer.
“Drill-tanks, turn west. We’ll plow right into the walls here. Let’s have a look at what’s on the inside.”
Autoshaded goggles flipped to black all up and down the column, on the faces of every marine’s hood I could see. Then my own went dark, and the big, short-ranged lasers flared up with blooming light. I closed my eyes, but still the glare was painful. I dropped my rifle, letting it dangle from the power cord and put my gloved hands to my face. I ordered everyone else to do the same, using the command override channel. I didn’t want to be blind, or even have splotchy vision, when these tanks finished chewing holes into the walls.
Eleven big, smoking holes were drilled into the stone wall. The main tunnel we were in filled with gray vapor. Atomized rock roared around my suit. I felt the air-conditioners kick on as the temperature soared. The fans quickly ran up several octaves to high.
Then the light leaking past my fingers dimmed. I dared to peak with my left. The drill-tanks had inched forward, sliding into the holes they’d bored. The tanks farthest back, however, hadn’t moved in yet. I frowned at them.
“You three in back, stop drilling. Forward tanks, keep going,” I shouted. I trotted back toward the last tanks in line. Their drilling nosecones glowed a deep cherry-red with intense heat.
“Nothing sir,” said the nearest pilot as he climbed out of his tank and came down to stand next to me.
We examined the wall together. We were only a few hundred yards from the entrance at this point. The stone was blackened, but seemed almost impervious to our drill-heads.
“This rock isn’t the same as the stuff farther in,” said the pilot. “It’s a lot tougher closer to the exit.
I nodded. “Bring your tank in deeper. You can follow another unit that has had an easier time of it.”
I trotted back to my unit and thought about what I’d seen. Perhaps the dead outside and the density of this outer area were connected. The Macros had indicated that the mountain had a tough shell, and that blasting at it from space had not been effective. I suspected they had done so previously, and at length. Perhaps that explained the dead Worms outside. Maybe, like a giant anthill, they had died in their thousands and their millions, but their mountain had withstood the assault.
I came up to the first drill-tank that was making progress. It had fully half its length inserted into the hole it had burrowed. I judged the process as too slow, however. We would never be able to drill our way into this mountain’s heart if it took a full minute for every yard of progress.
“Sir, up here!” said Major Yamada, my tank commander. “Lead drill-tank, reporting a sudden change in rock-density!”
“Talk to me, Major.”
“If you get in about thirty feet, it gets a lot easier, sir. A lot easier.”
I slapped Kwon’s chest as I ran by him. He caught on and trotted after me, as we ran toward the front of our long line of drill-tanks and men.
My celebration was short-lived. The Worms chose that moment to make their objections to our presence in their territory very clear.
-51-
“Worms, Colonel Riggs! Zillions of ‘em!”
I heard the override shout in my headset, it came in over the command channel without the speaker identifying himself. It had to be one of my drill-tank pilots, I figured. This calculation proved correct, as I heard the drill-tank farthest up the line, the one I had sent into the tunnel first, begin firing. Rather than the steady pulsing beam of the drill, which was built to burn rock a few feet from the nosecone of the tank, the beam unit could be focused further forward to be used as a short-range weapon.
“Report!” I shouted, running now toward the front of our column. Heavy footsteps behind me indicated Kwon was right on my heels. “Is that you, Yamada? Specify enemy contact.”
More firing erupted ahead of me. I thought it was coming from the second drill-tank in line.
“Broken through—into some kind of chamber,” came the response. His labored breath blew over the microphone. “This is Major Yamada, lead tank, reporting.”
“All tanks, stop drilling,” I ordered. “Withdraw into the main tunnel. We’ve made a breakthrough.”
“They’ve got something big they are rolling up, sir. I can’t focus that far back.”
I grimaced. Out of range? That indicated Yamada had opened up a seriously large chamber. The tank’s nosecone weapon should be able to effectively strike at a range of at least two hundred yards.
I arrived, puffing and pushing past a clot of marines. They were trying to support the drill-tank, but couldn’t get around it in the narrow, freshly-bored tunnel. Yamada was backing out, and marines were dodging to get out of the way. He never made it, however. I heard a heavy thump, then the front of the tank exploded. It had been hit by a shell of some kind and knocked out.
My little Nano tanks were deadly at range, but they were not heavily-armored. I’d always known that if they were hit by something serious, their two inches of front-facing nanite armor would fold inward like cardboard.
“Yamada?” I shouted, but there was no response. He was probably dead in there.
I switched my voice-out to local, and shouted at the men around me. “Grab this thing and pull it back. We can’t let them have time to organize and attack.”
A dozen powerful hands gripped the tank anyway we could. Normally, Nano machines were smooth and rounded in every dimension. This one had been hit, however, and looked like a splashed mass of metal. Frozen with flanges sticking out in every direction, I could tell the brainbox had been hit. The nanites had no instructions, and so held their chains where the enemy shell had left them.