Robinson turned to Captain Sarin. “Get a corpsman in here, we have an officer in need of care.”
I waved a hand at him and leaned the other heavily on the computer table. “I’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ve just had the wind knocked out of me.”
They ignored my words and brought in the corpsman. I was surprised to see it was Sandra. She had taken the training, I’d known that. And it made sense that she was the closest certified noncombatant.
“Hi hon,” I said.
Sandra made an exasperated sound and went to work on me. It wasn’t the first time she’d performed emergency first aid on my sorry ass. I suspected it wouldn’t be the last. I tried to ignore her as she pulled my torso out of my suit and dabbed, probed and ripped lengths of tape. She whispered things to me, while she worked. Threats about what she would do if I ever got myself torn up like this again. These sorts of threats only made sense to Sandra.
“Give me the big picture, Robinson,” I said.
“We’re winning, sir.”
“Losses?”
“Five hovertanks were destroyed, but less than one hundred KIAs. The Worms surprised us, but they ran into our surprises as well. I think they meant to hit us from underneath simultaneously, timing it with the perimeter attacks. But our nanite-woven shielding under the base slowed them down and channeled their attacks into three breach points. We were able to burn them before they could get the interior assault underway.”
I nodded. “What about the big waves from outside?”
“Your position was hard hit. They did manage to take the rocky outcroppings, and the northern flank in general was overrun, but I pulled troops from the other walls where we’d repelled them and sent reinforcements to the breach points. We pretty much slaughtered them.”
“Enemy casualties?” I asked, wincing as Sandra jabbed me with something sharp. I heard a clicking sound, and realized it was as stapler. We didn’t bother with sutures these days, the nanites took care of the fine work. Rapidly stapling up a wound and wrapping it tightly to prevent blood loss worked best. The nanites would automatically push the staples out after awhile when they were no longer needed.
“The computer has done a recognition sweep with all the sensors. Over nine thousand Worms died, sir.”
I looked up at him, impressed. “We did slaughter them, then. You did well.”
“Yes sir,” Robinson said proudly. “Clearly, they miscalculated.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they were desperate. I believe they are smarter than they look. I don’t think they expected to win, but thought it was worth a try.”
“Sir?”
“I want you to recalibrate and redirect our sensors downward. I don’t care about the sky or the surface of this rock. I want to know what they are doing under our feet.”
Robinson paused and frowned. “You don’t think this is over, sir?”
I snorted. “If the Worms had landed in Central Park and smashed back our first assault, do you think we would quit?”
-45-
The Worms hadn’t given up. They were hard at work underneath us, tunneling deeply.
“There’s something big, sir. Metallic,” Captain Sarin told me, flipping images on the screen. “It’s about a thousand feet down in a soil substrate. I think the ground there is softer, maybe easier to dig through.”
The big screen showed crawling, finger-like traces heading in our direction. They had converged and were aiming directly toward our position. I stared at them in growing concern. It was obvious where the tunnels had come from. Tracing backward from its current location led directly to the huge mountain.
“We’ll keep an eye on things, sir,” said Major Robinson. “At this rate, the Worms won’t be under us for hours.”
I continued to stare at the screen, not saying anything. I didn’t like this new, gathering assault.
Behind me, a small, strong hand plucked at the staples holding together my injuries. I knew it was Sandra, letting me know she wanted me to come to our quarters with her and take a break. She wanted me out of the command post and under her not-so-gentle care. But she wouldn’t speak, I knew that too. She had no official capacity here, and knew enough not to interrupt a command discussion.
I turned to her and tried to smile. I think I failed. She frowned back. She could tell immediately I wasn’t going to do what she wanted. “Sandra, thanks for the field-dressing. Excellent work as always. Could you return to your post in my office now?”
Sandra nodded, but gave me a small, pursed-mouth glare. She didn’t bother to help me pull up my suit and help me reseal it. She turned around without a word and left. The spring-loaded door prevented her from slamming it behind her. I watched her shapely form exit—somehow, when she was angry, she managed to look even hotter.
The command staff tried not to appear embarrassed as she left and I stared after her. The whole thing was unprofessional, but I hardly cared. Dying in a firefight with alien Worms on a newly discovered planet—all in the name of service to machine overlords—didn’t fit the norm, either. We made our own rules in my outfit. I pressed my own suit into place, activating the nanites via proximity so they linked up and sealed the fabric.
Once she was gone, I turned to my officers and tapped on the screen where the contact blinked. The tapping caused it to zoom in closer. There was no more detail to be seen, however. Only a wireframe cube drawn in warning yellow.
“What if this is one of their thermonuclear mines?” I asked, voicing the thought that had been on my mind the entire time.
“They haven’t hit us with anything big like that yet,” Robinson argued. “I figured maybe they don’t want to set off a big radiation mess right here so close to their stronghold.”
“Yeah, but maybe we just changed their plans for them. Maybe after we skunked their assault team, they’ve decided they will just have to live with a little radiation.”
Robinson sighed. “It could be, sir. I don’t like any of this. We’ve yet to gain the initiative on this mission. We’ve been reacting to enemy attacks since we entered the system.”
“Well, let’s change that. Send out hovertanks with sensor arrays hugging the dirt. I want to see everything that’s underground between us and this advancing force. Have the tanks stop, turning off every system except the sensors and then set them active. Ping away at the enemy. When the tanks detect something, they can relay the findings.”
Robinson didn’t follow my orders immediately. Instead, he stared at me in concern. “We’ve already lost a quarter of our hovertanks, sir, and they are the units that did the most damage in the last battle.”
“I don’t care. The enemy won’t find our tanks easy to sneak up on with their sensors active and directed downward. These Worms won’t come at us in the air or over the land. They will dig to us. That’s how they operate. If we can see them coming, we’ll have the advantage. We can move over the surface faster than they can maneuver underground.”
In the end, the objections stopped coming and my staff did what I wanted. We deployed our hovertanks between the base and the massive mountain that loomed in the dark nearby. I knew Sandra was waiting like a spider for me in my office, so I didn’t go near it. I sent for food and drink, and received a tuna fish sandwich that wasn’t made with tuna fish. I swilled it down with a squeeze bottle of water. At least the water was cold and tasted fresh, despite the fact it was heavily recycled. Nanites made great filtering agents.
The hovertank scouts didn’t take long to pinpoint the enemy. In less than an hour, we had a fix on them.
“They are about a mile down, sir,” said the Navigator. He’d been recruited as our underground tracker in this environment. “But they are coming up now, toward the surface.”