Each of the three targeted tunnels quickly swallowed an entire company of my marines. I watched them go, flicking my fingers one against another. I cracked my knuckles. Each one individually. Captain Sarin winced at the popping sounds, but I kept going until two joints on every finger had clicked. After that, I noticed the men had vanished as if I’d already buried them. Oddly, I felt better.
“Pull in the hovertanks,” I ordered. “We’ll let the enemy think we are withdrawing to await another assault here in our base. Leave only two out there. Turn off the active pinging, have the last two sit and listen passively. Tell them to be quiet, too. I’m sure these bastard Worms have good hearing.”
After that, we waited. There were no transmissions coming from the three companies of marines. We didn’t want the Worms to know they were there, waiting in ambush.
“The Worms are still coming, sir,” Captain Sarin murmured.
I smiled at her. “Don’t worry, they can’t hear us in here.”
“Sorry, sir,” she said.
“How long have we got?”
“Robinson and his men will be in position in eight minutes.”
I looked toward the door. Beyond it was the corridor, my office, and Sandra. I didn’t really have time to go in there and tell her I’d sent Robinson rather than risking my own skin this time. I pulled up an app and sent her a private text.
I sent Robinson.
A moment later, the answer came with a tiny ding. I know, babe.
Frowning, I checked my person for a new bell. I found it in my suit. She had planted a little transmitter in my back pocket while she had patched me up after the last fight. I flicked it off and put it back in my pocket. I eyed the thing, shaking my head.
You’ve become sneaky.
The app dinged again. I always was.
“Sir, something’s happening,” said Captain Sarin. “The contact is turning. They are coming up toward tunnel three.”
Robinson himself was waiting in tunnel two, the central tunnel. His company formed a cool green glow of massed contacts, waiting underground for the digging machines to arrive. I studied the screen.
“Should we alert Robinson, sir?”
I shook my head. “To get a signal down there we’d have to beam it directly to them, which would tip our hand—or send down a nanite strand, which would take too long. Dammit, I wish we’d waited to see for sure where they were going. We could have put all our assets into ambush at the right spot.”
It was hard, waiting out the next few minutes. “If they set that thing off right where they are, what will be the estimated damages?” I asked. I had to ask. It was my job—but I didn’t really want to hear the answer.
“The company in tunnel three will be lost. No chance of survival. Company in the central tunnel will probably die as well, due to shocks and cave-ins. Company one and the base itself should be fine—that’s assuming the charge is the same size as the mines we met flying into the system.”
“How long until the Worms reach our men waiting in tunnel three?”
“About seventeen minutes, sir.”
“Captain Sarin, you are in operational control. I’m going to lead two more companies down tunnel three.”
She looked shocked. “Why, sir?”
“To make sure the Worms don’t have time to set off their bomb.”
“But sir, in that case we’ll lose three companies instead of one.”
I was buttoning up, sealing nanite lines and pulling my hood into place. I spoke through the hood to answer her, which muffled my speech. “Those calculations only hold if the enemy bomb is a small one. If it’s bigger, we have to stop it or we all die. I’m not going to take that risk.”
I left them then and slammed my way out of the airlock. I wondered as I ran to form up two companies behind me how long it would take Sandra to figure out I’d gone down into the tunnels afterward. I figured she probably already knew. She was a smart girl.
The jog to the camp perimeter turned into a dead run once we were outside the limits of the camp. Kwon himself had answered the call for fresh, ready troops. He caught up with me before I reached the tunnel entrance, puffing in his suit.
“Crazy moves, sir,” he said.
“What’s crazy?”
“You love fighting the Worms, don’t you?”
“Oh, that part. No, I don’t. I would hate losing to them, though.”
We dove into the darkness then. It swallowed us up. The first dozen steps were taken in almost drunken staggers along the ribbed, crumbling tunnel floor. Compared to the blazing red sky outside, the tunnels were intensely dark. The ceiling wasn’t high enough to stand upright, either. I had to run in a crouch, bent at the waist. My powerpack scraped the ceiling of the Worm tunnel, causing loose rock and sand to sift down onto my back. A choking cloud of dust arose as we went deeper, sliding down mini-dirtfalls of loose soil. I knew, if I hadn’t been wearing the suit with its filters and recyclers, I’d be choking and coughing by now.
We went down a hundred yards, jogged forward another two hundred, then slid downward, spiraling further still into the depths. At the end of the next slide, huge boots crashed into my back and rammed me into a tunnel wall.
“I’m so glad they regrew your lost foot to its full size again, Sergeant,” I said.
“Sorry sir. They were too big when I was seven.”
I nodded and climbed back up again and ran farther into the tunnels. Behind me, Kwon came on, puffing like a bear in a plastic suit. A hundred men followed him, then a hundred more after that.
I paused when we reached the last downward junction. “The Worms should have come up by now. I don’t hear anything.”
“We got here first, Colonel,” Kwon said.
I blinked inside the blackness of my suit. Cool air whispered across my body, drying sweat and making my eyelids itch. One of the worst things about these suits was the impossibility of scratching one’s face through them. I wondered vaguely if I could script a bead of nanites to do some scratching for the comfort of my men in full environment suits.
“I don’t like it. Kwon, send a squad forward.”
There was a brief spate of shouting and arm-waving. Soon, troops ran past me.
“Keep a sharp eye,” I told them.
The squad leader nodded to me, and then vanished into the blackness ahead. I looked back up the tunnel, where my men thronged the tunnel in a long line. Suddenly, I thought this entire venture had been a very bad idea. This was Worm territory. This was their home ground. They could walk through these walls like ghosts, while we were strung out and blinded.
A sound came from the tunnel ahead. It was an odd sound. It was something like—crackling bones. An image was conjured in my head of my squad crushed to jelly, every bone in their bodies broken all at once. I crouched and unslung my rifle, waiting and peering into the dark, listening. Around me, a dozen men did the same. The eerie sound was not repeated.
We got a signal, however. “Gone sir…” came crackling words. “I… all of them….”
I lost the transmission. Kwon lifted his com-link to respond, but I slapped his hand down. “We’re maintaining radio silence.”
“If they are listening and heard that transmission, they already know we are here now, sir,” Kwon said reasonably.
I heaved a sigh and lifted my own com-link. “Report your location and your unit.”