“Sure they will, Major. They won’t waste good troops. It would be… inefficient. All we have to do is finish the mission.”
“Yes sir,” the Major said.
I raised my eyebrows, surprised my glib argument had worked on him. I had no idea if the Macros would come back. I supposed that had always been the job of mission commanders, to provide confidence to subordinates. I wondered whose job it was to blow sunshine into my ears.
When the third hour passed, the sky fell suddenly and intensely dark. Helios had a short rotation period of only nine hours. This made the transition from day to night three times shorter than what we were used to. Accelerating the effect was the looming mountain nearby which blocked the massive, red star before it went down completely. Once night had swept over the alien landscape, the darkness was more complete than it normally was on Earth. The planet had no moons. There was only starlight overhead, and the thicker, hazy atmosphere blocked much of that.
The temperature dropped dramatically—going down with the sun. Like any desert, the days were hot and the nights were surprisingly cold. Fortunately, our suits were more than up to the task of adjusting for the variance. We’d planned for much worse conditions.
We were still interconnecting the bricks when the enemy hit us. It turned out the bugs—or Worms as we came to call them—were smarter than I thought. The best time to hit a beachhead was as soon as possible with massive force. The goal was always to knock it back immediately. Any invasion is at its weakest at the moment of arrival. We hadn’t set up. We hadn’t had time to dig in. We had very little ground covered. We were new to the territory. We hadn’t had time yet to scout the area. We had barely begun to set up our fortifications.
“Sir,” my com-link buzzed. “This is Major Yamada. I’ve got contacts.”
“What are your tanks telling you, Major?” I asked. I stopped walking around on my pile of boulders and listened intently. Yamada was the commander of my hovertanks. They were my primary defense during the fortification effort. Most critically, they had the only sensor arrays currently deployed, one of the garbage-can like devices was a central component of every hovertank. Until I had stationary sensors and beam turrets set up, the hovertanks were my eyes as well as being my primary defensive units.
“Mass contacts, coming in columns,” Yamada told me, “But we’ve scanned the plain around us with infrared visuals. We haven’t spotted anything.”
I nodded. “That’s probably because they are tunneling underneath us. We have to think in three dimensions here, Major. Prepare for battle. I don’t want to see any of your pilots leaning against their machines taking a piss. Patrol the perimeter. Don’t let your tanks get caught as stationary targets.”
“Roger that, sir,” Yamada said, breaking off.
Within moments, the entire hovertank group lifted and began gliding slowly around our cluster of stacked bricks. Their beam turrets swiveled independently—aiming primarily at the ground.
“Men,” I said, addressing the entire unit via my com-link override. “We are about to make contact with the enemy. An attack in imminent. Take your posts and expect the unexpected.”
Although Helios had fallen into a pitch-black night, lamps had been set up to keep the camp brightly lit. These lamps beamed down from atop every brick we’d placed and locked down. I watched as my troops got my message and digested it. The effect on the marines was intense. They had been glancing around in concern, watching the hovertanks begin to move, but now they were openly alarmed. Men ran and sprang into foxholes.
I cursed as I watched this last. It was a natural reaction. Now, I wished we’d never dug a hole in the camp. I reopened the channel.
“Marines, everyone get out of those holes. I don’t want to see any boots on flat ground. Get up on top of the bricks or find a boulder to hug. Move.”
Men scrambled like rats, adjusting equipment, shouting. The Worms didn’t give us much time. Unsurprisingly, they came out of the ground. What did surprise me were the machines they rode upon. I should have expected a mechanized attack, I realized that the moment I saw it boiling up out of the crunchy soil of Helios. I’d known they were technologically advanced. But somehow, I’d always thought I would see these Worms as naked beasts. I should have known that if they’d been able to plant thermonuclear mines in space, they wouldn’t be coming at us with nothing more than pinchers and garden tools. But I’d always envisioned this as a bug-hunt. I’d figured I would be fighting hand-to-hand with a knife in each palm, slashing my way through piles of charging Worms.
But things didn’t start off that way. They came at us riding in machines. Their strange vehicles resembled tubular sleds of ribbed, flexing metal—reminding me of the duct behind my electric Whirlpool drier back home. In the dark, all I saw at first was the brilliant flaring of the beam units the sleds had clustered at the nosecone. I realized instantly the beams were primarily for melting away the soil in front of the tunneling machine, but they could also be used as weapons. Then the full length of the rippling metal machines came into sight, flowing up out of the ground and charging at our hovertanks and the square of bricks behind them. The Worms themselves rode in these sleds, leaning out of openings in the flexing metal that allowed them to rear up in a pose making them resemble striking snakes. They looked around and worked rifle-like weapons of their own. They had no hands, but they had plenty of small legs and mandibles around their jaws. They used these appendages to operate their weapons, which were harnessed to their bodies. More and more tunneling sleds crested and burst out of Helios’ alien ground all around us. The Worms fired from their sleds reminding me of ancient charioteers.
Our men and hovertanks let rip with a massive barrage of laser-fire. My autoshade goggles blacked out completely at times, but I could still see the intense streaks of released energy. In flashes, I saw Worm sleds scar, blacken and finally explode as they were lanced with hundreds of beams. Worm troops rolled out of their burning sleds and slithered closer, only to be shot a dozen more times before their smoking bodies stilled.
“North flank!” I heard over the command channel. “North flank, they are breaking through!”
I had my light rifle out and trotted to the opposite side of my rocky outcropping. I was on the northwest side of the camp. A knot of marines who’d been stationed here grouped up with me. I halted, waving to half of them.
“You men hold here. Hug a separate boulder each. Don’t lose this high ground. If they take this outcropping, they will be able to fire down into our camp center. The other half of you follow me.”
One half scattered, the second group—seven men—crunched behind me. We reached the northern side and saw the problem immediately. On this flank the Worms had bored out of the ground closer in. They were between the hovertanks and our outer line of bricks. In many cases, they had come up right in the middle of the hovertanks and gutted them, getting in close with those nosecone beam-clusters. Our hovertanks had run right over the beams and been sliced open like horses running over blades. Three of the hovertanks were smoldering wrecks. The last one had halted and was encircled by Worm sleds.
“Focus fire on those sleds!” I shouted, kneeling and taking aim. “Let’s save that tanker.”
We fired with deadly accuracy. The men along the bricktops nearby saw our streaking beams cutting through the night from the enemy flank and joined in. After less than a minute, we had driven the surviving sleds back to their holes.
The battle was far from over, however. There was a lull, but it was measurable in seconds. Reports began coming in then.