We pressed the Worm defenders back, meeting only skirmishers. But we could tell they were building up for something big, gathering their strength. I came to appreciate that most of the Worms that had once lived in this vast place had to be dead. We’d seen millions of bodies buried outside, but only met thousands in the heart of the place. I wondered how many Worms could live in a place like this, a vast nest, if it were fully populated.
We reached a slope that went upward, and when we topped the rise, we met a surprise. It wasn’t the surprise I’d been expecting—namely about fifty thousand pissed Worms. Instead, it was a depression of sorts, a bowl formed in the middle of the mountain. We were very close to the spot my maps told me the Macros wanted us to reach. Looking down the slope into the center of that dish of earth, the answer was very plain.
A ring sat there. A ring that was smaller, much smaller, than the ones I’d seen before. It was probably only two hundred yards wide. Half of it was sunk down into the earth. Looking at it, I suspected it had been buried, or had been constructed bit by bit from the bottom up.
There were Worms crawling over the ring and around it. The device was clearly made of the same sort of material the others I’d seen were made of. I hoped I would have time to study it, the information could be invaluable to our own nerds back home.
“Flip on every suit recorder we have,” I ordered. “Roku, order your tanks to scan that thing continuously, and store the feed. I want every brainbox we have to bring home a record of it.”
Seeing us, Worms began humping, crawling from all sides of the ring. They dropped the last dozen feet to the floor of the place and squirmed away. My men fired down on them, burning them as they ran. I ordered them to stop, as the enemy was unarmed.
“Where the hell are the Worm troops?” asked Kwon at my side.
“More importantly,” I said, “how did the Worms get a ring down here?”
“Maybe they found it, and built this mound over it. Maybe it is their god.”
I huffed. “I think the Macros fear this ring. The Worms have a plan, and the Macros sent us down here to stop them. Maybe this thing will transport a Worm army to the Macro homeworld. Maybe it will let them push their nuclear mines through to blast the Macros.”
“Let’s take it and find out,” Kwon suggested.
I nodded. “Company Alpha swing left, Echo right. I want one tank leading each group. The rest advance toward the artifact. Fire only if fired upon. If they are surrendering and in retreat, maybe we can finish this without further bloodshed.”
I figured I was dreaming when I described this final step as a cakewalk. But the Worms still managed to surprise me.
-55-
The Worm troops were hiding, of course. Not out around us in the forest of fan-like growths. They were right there, all along the rim of the bowl that surrounded their ring. They had dug in and laid waiting under our feet. By the time I’d advanced my forces to the ring and we were completely in the bowl, they exploded out of the ground and charged us, raging, from every direction at once.
I really wished, at that moment, that Chen or Jensen or at least one of their sensor arrays had survived the trip, but they had all been lost or destroyed along the way. We couldn’t see what they had in store for us, and thus were taken by surprise.
Thousands of them. They came on, guns chugging out steady streams of popping balls. We burned them, and they blasted us. The bowl wasn’t very large, and they were in close in less than a minute. The drill-tanks rotated their big weapons, spraying blinding heat into the advancing enemy like flamethrowers. Ranks of Worms turned into twisting, smoking bodies. Often, their magazines of explosive pellets were ignited, and the resulting explosion flattened everyone nearby.
We were killing them ten to one, but they still had the weight of numbers. Once in close, when it was down to knife-work, the Worm troops had the advantage. They were six times the weight of a man, stronger, and their jaws were deadly.
Kwon and I took up a stance in the center. The bowl-shape of the terrain helped us then. We had a free field of fire. Since the enemy were higher up than my marines, we could fire over our men and hit the Worm troops that were still pouring out of the holes around the rim.
“Mark your target!” roared Kwon. “Don’t burn one of my men in the back or I’ll burn a hole in yours!”
I sent the center tanks to the front—which was everywhere. “Pull back Bravo and Delta,” I shouted into my com-link. “I want a central reserve in case they break through our line completely. We’ll give fire support from the base of the ring itself.”
“Sir!” shouted Kwon, standing back-to-back with me. We both fired intermittently, steadily, out into the massed enemy ranks.
“What?”
“Sir, we have to get out of here.”
“We’re holding them.”
“But we don’t know what this thing is going to do,” Kwon pointed out.
I glanced over my shoulder and looked up at the big ring that loomed overhead. It was mottled and craggy. It seemed weathered and ancient, rather than freshly built. But who knew with the Worms? Nothing they made had straight lines and smooth surfaces.
“You think they wanted us to hug this thing?” I asked.
“They gave us one surprise,” said Kwon reasonably. “Why not two?”
“Yeah, why not?” I agreed.
Bravo and Delta companies had gathered in the center with surprising speed. No one wanted to be on the front lines, holding back the mass of charging Worms. There semed to be no end to them. The bodies were stacking up into steaming heaps. Some of the enemy troops were scrabbling over the bodies of their comrades or burrowing under to get to us.
“We’re going to break out! Everyone push back the same way we came in. We know the way out if we head in that direction.”
The men needed little encouragement. We marched southward, and the enemy lines folded away from us, falling back from our concentrated fire.
When I reached the rim of the bowl, I looked back and realized I couldn’t withdraw entirely. We’d made it to our destination. We had to tell the Macros about it. I got out the special unit, the one that was tied to the glittering trail of nanites that wound back all the way to the outside world. I wondered how many times the wire had been broken. I’d seen it snap just from a marine carelessly treading on it. The wire had naturally repaired itself, being made up of billions of nanites. Miles of nanites, spun along a hair-thin path to the world of sun and wind. Just thinking about it made me homesick for an open vista. I’d even welcome the red, fluttering glare of Helios right then.
I pressed the button I’d never pressed until then. The one that opened up a channel to the Macro command.
“Identify,” came the response, quickly and coolly.
I relaxed a little. I hadn’t known if the thing would really work until then. “This is Colonel Kyle Riggs. I’ve reached the goal point. The mission is complete.”
“The mission is incomplete.”
I stared down at the pitched battle around the ring. In two spots, our lines had fallen back. They had not yet buckled, but I could do the math. With each wave of Worms that poured out of the holes, we lost a number of men. At some point, we would lose too many and the enemy would break us. We’d dissolve into pockets of struggling, encircled, desperate survivors. If they had enough troops and enough time, we would be slaughtered. There would be no surrender. No retreat. Maybe this is what the enemy had planned all along. Maybe Kwon was right, and they did worship here at this ancient altar. That made us a dramatic blood-sacrifice.