Over the sound of the chain gun there was a keening sound that made Samuel sick to his stomach. As the sound moved up and down the octave scale the marine realized that it was an artificial sound. He could see that, as insane as it seemed, the worms seemed to move and undulate in time to the keening sound.
There was little doubt in his mind that there were Stalkers somewhere back there, just behind the light, driving and guiding the herd of frenzied worms.
Harold and his chain gun were positioned perhaps twenty inches above the chamber, thanks to the spillway architecture compared to the flood chamber, and that provided him with just enough elevation to fire his weapon over the heads the fleeing marines and into the mass of attacking worms.
“Patrick, you’re with me! That gate has to close before the worms break through or everyone dies!” ordered Boss Aiken as he hefted his service pistol and rushed out from behind the gun nest. “Hyst and Kade, I want you across the way, when Harold’s line of fire is impeded by the door I want you to provide cover fire and pull our people through if they reach us in time!”
“Boss, this chain gun won’t last long without a jam if I don’t have a loader to keep it clear!” Harold yelled in between deafening bursts of the weapon, sending barrages of high velocity rounds tearing through the writhing mass of deadly worms as they gained more and more ground on the weary marines who ran before them.
“You won’t have much time, anyway!” Boss Aiken snapped and with that he and Patrick sprinted towards the gate to begin closing it while Samuel and Bianca backed out of the nest and made for the other side.
Harold snarled in frustration as he continued to burst fire and tear apart the hostile creatures that pressed onwards heedless of the grievous damage he was doing to them.
Boss Aiken and Patrick positioned themselves next to the door and waited, giving the fleeing marines as much time as they could to reach the other side of the gate. Samuel dared not lean in too far for fear of friendly fire from the chain gun. He could tell that they were drawing near as he began to hear the desperate splashing as the escaping marines struggled through a foot and a half of water.
Samuel could also hear the inhuman grating noise of the worms as they slammed their heads into the tunnel floor, presumably only narrowly missing their prey. Seconds later Harold’s chain gun jammed and the big marine cursed as he stepped back and kicked the gun in an attempt to clear the action.
Boss Aiken nodded gravely and he and Samuel began pushing against the door with all of his might. The door began inching closed, groaning as the rusted hinges fought against their combined strength. Without Harold’s fire as a risk, both Samuel and Bianca turned the corner and pointed their sidearms down the tunnel. The worms were closing in on the marines as they struggled through the water. Samuel watched with dread as a worm attempted to impale Boss Ulanti with its armored head, only narrowly missing the squad leader and burying its head in the metal tunnel wall.
Samuel and Bianca opened fire, their bullets whizzing over the heads of Boss Marsters and Ulanti and into the tangle of worms that had all but plugged the tunnel from top to bottom. Boss Marsters slipped through the gate and was followed by Boss Ulanti. Samuel emptied his sidearm and as Bianca fired her last round the marine grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back on top of him as they fell away from the closing gate.
Boss Aiken and Patrick slammed the door against the mass of worms trying to force their way through, one of them even managing to get its head through the gap. Harold slammed himself against the door, the force of his impact decapitating the worm and giving Patrick a chance to crank the wheel which locked the gate in place.
With the gate firmly shut and the worms held at bay, at least for the time being, Samuel risked a glance at Boss Marsters and the other marines realizing belatedly, that the rescue had not been without sacrifice.
Glaringly absent were George Tuck and Vol, and worse still, to Samuel’s horrified gaze was the mangled and corroded mess that was the front of Ben’s helmet, a gaping crater where his lower jaw should have been.
9. COLLATERAL DAMAGE
When the bombs planted in deepspire detonated, Samuel and Jada could feel the rumble as the pylons were blown out even from the high rise balcony of the medical center. The two marines watched as the great FORGE ALPHA shook violently and then suddenly collapsed into the sinkhole that formed at the edges of the complex and rapidly swallowed the entire quadrant of upspire.
Buildings that had been stripped down to bare concrete collapsed inwards upon themselves and the weight piled on as more and more of the superstructure came apart. It was an awe inspiring display of demolition skill by the engineer corps, to so expertly calculate the pyro loads, angles of descent, and relative weight of the area to be collapsed. Not a single building that wasn’t on the demo list was harmed. Once the site was given a full day and night cycle to settle, the support crews, with Reaper foremen and security details, would bring in the giant salvage cranes.
Using powerful magnets they would pull up the scrap metal and prep it for transport. The prize pieces were, in fact, the support pylons. They were so large that the pylons would be carefully lifted from the rubble and cut while still protruding from the sinkhole. As each pylon was cut into manageable sections they would be hauled to a staging area for holding. It would take several trips with more than one scrap barge to move all of the material off world.
There would be enough raw metal from just one of the pylons salvaged from underneath FORGE ALPHA to build several ships the size of the lumbering Reaper tug. The fact that the forge had been supported by four of them meant that just the salvaged pylons would be enough metal to build an entire fleet of ships.
There was not a doubt in Samuel’s mind that Grotto would reconcile as an acceptable expenditure, the cost of the lives and bullets of the handful of Reapers and several score cor-sec troopers that were spent in penetrating the Basin to cut the pylons and prep them for salvage.
There were hundreds of other, smaller pylons spread throughout the city, and in due time all of those would be taken as well. Reaper Command had deemed it prudent to salvage the city one quadrant at a time once the surface had been stripped and it was time to collapse the hollowed out upspire.
Much of this, Samuel suspected, had to do with the intel Tango Platoon had gathered with regards to the presence of the bone worms and Stalkers. Despite the detonations and subsequent collapse, it was highly likely that some Stalkers and worms survived, so Reaper security details, with cor-sec support, were on duty at all hours while the looting of Vorhold continued.
“There’s no way the collapse wiped out those monsters,” said Jada in a small voice as she stared unblinking at the gigantic hole in the ground. “We’ll be fighting them tooth and nail until Grotto finally decides to abandon the site. They’ll be here haunting the ruins long after we’ve run out of things to salvage.”
“Plenty of Vorhold people who chose the red list over the life-bond will also be here,” agreed Samuel. He folded his arms in front of himself and watched the first of the cranes approach the new work site. “And eventually pirates, smugglers, pioneers, and every other kind of red list scavenger will find their way here. Maybe now that there’s nothing valuable remaining, this planet will be abandoned by the corporations and re-settled by the red list.”
“At least until they discover some other kind of resource that’s buried here, like back on Tetra Prime,” said Jada as she continued to stare at the growing plume of dust and smoke from the collapse. “Even if it’s a decade or a century from now, eventually someone like us will be back to pick the bones clean one more time, and when they dig up that hole they’ll get what they deserve.”