Kwon dragged my fingers to a handhold on the hovertank. There were plenty of handholds around the base of every tank for soldiers to hang onto. Kwon crushed my fingers around one of these loops of metal. I would have shouted in pain, but I didn’t care about pain just then. Kwon then used one of his ham-like fists to grip another handhold himself and placed his second hand on the back of my neck. I kept hold of the grip he made for me, but he still held me by the scruff of the neck, as if he didn’t trust me and I thought I might let go.
There were marines around me, inside and outside of the tank, but not many of them. I craned my neck back to watch as we raced away, half-dragging marines and smashing down coral-like growths.
I looked back and watched hundreds of marines and Worms, swept high up in a maelstrom. Many of them embraced. Knives and beamers flashed, maws snapped. By ones and twos and clusters of up to a dozen struggling forms, they were all sucked together into nothingness.
I wondered if, when they reached the far side, they continued fighting to the bitter end. I suspected—knowing both my men and the Worms—that they did.
-56-
When we reached our base of bricks, the Macro ship had already landed. Ice crystals, formed no doubt in this strange planet’s upper atmosphere, crackled and fell away in blue-white sheets. I assumed they were formed from water vapor, but I couldn’t really be sure and didn’t care to ask.
The base itself was a mess. They’d suffered a Worm counterattack—possibly one motivated by revenge. I leapt off the tank I’d been riding upon, one that was positively roomy now that we’d lost three quarters of our troops. I sprinted into the bricks, leaping atop the first one I saw. The command brick, which had been situated upon a stack of others in the central compound, had been knocked over. It lay on its side, canted downward so one end was thrust into the ground. The airlock was up high, stuck up into the air. Bodies were everywhere. Most of them were Worms, but one in ten was a marine.
I ran up over a steaming pile of corpses and leapt to the top of one brick, then another. I went to the command brick airlock, and ripped at it.
A hand fell on my shoulder. I whirled. It was Major Robinson. I could tell from the look of him that he’d finally gotten his chance to prove himself in combat. He had a fixt-sized hole in his side that was black and oozing.
“She’s not in there, sir. We evacuated the command post when the Worms flipped it.”
“Where then?” I said, panting from my run and my panic.
Robinson pointed out toward the limits of the camp, to the north. I saw a figure sitting out there on the top of a brick. I ran to her, but didn’t sweep her up in my arms. She had a knife in her hand, and it was covered in gore.
“Sandra?” I asked, kneeling beside her.
“You came back,” she said. She didn’t look at me.
“Yeah. I’m back.”
“I didn’t really think you could survive walking into their nest.”
“Most of us didn’t. But we have to prep up. We have to go now.”
“I killed them. Lots of them. Some were our own men.”
I looked at her and eyed the knife in her hands. Some of the gore on it was dark red, not the usual brown that filled the Worms. I wasn’t sure what to say. Had she lost her mind?
“I’m still not very good with a knife,” she said.
“What happened?” I asked.
Sandra shook her head, and drew her knees up to her chest. She rocked slightly while she told me about Worms tearing holes in the suits of men and injecting them with some kind of bio-poison. They’d died slowly after the battle, beyond the help of nanites or corpsmen. They had screamed and raved and begged her to kill them. In some cases, she had done as the marines had asked.
I waited until she was done, then she hugged me, and I comforted her as best I could. Despite everything, she felt good in my arms. I could feel the shape of her, under the bulky suit. Something tight in my belly relaxed a notch. At least I hadn’t lost Sandra.
“Are you going to tell me all the shit you went through in that mountain, now?” she asked.
“No.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Don’t ever tell me, okay?”
“I won’t.”
The Macro ship came down a few minutes later. There was no time for rest. The Transport opened its yawning maw to swallow us all whole again and take us away from Helios, and I for one would be glad to see the last of this world.
We gathered everything we could and began loading. Before we were half-finished, an earthquake shook the planet. The arid, cracked surface of the land split. Movement caught my eye, something huge shifted. I looked up to the north and my jaw sagged down inside my suit.
The mountain, the home of the Worms, had collapsed in upon itself. It took a long time to fall all the way down. The shoulders fell first, then the cone-like top crashed down. A vast plume of dust and debris shot up into the sky, blotting out the red sun, casting our tiny base into shadow.
I felt cold inside. We’d done the Worms more harm than they deserved. And although the creatures were viscous and disgusting, it was I who’d led an army onto their land, not the other way around.
We had righted the command brick on top of the growing stack inside the hold. Around us, the rest of the bricks began to appear, one by one. Our last operating loading machines were performing their final duties. Theirs was the long labor of stacking all the bricks into the Macro transport’s hold again. It went much more slowly this time, because most of our loading machines had been destroyed.
“Colonel, sorry to interrupt,” said a voice in my ear. I tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t go away.
“What is it, Major Robinson?” I asked in resignation.
“Yes sir. There’s something—ah, I think you’d better come to the op center, sir.”
I frowned, not liking the worry in his voice. “I’ll be right there.”
I had to take Sandra’s hand from my sleeve, where it had landed the moment I took the call. She’d gotten more clingy today. I tried to do this as gently and quickly as I could without hurting her feelings. Naturally, I failed.
I left her pouting on top of a brick in the hold and trudged into the command module. Captain Sarin was there, I was glad to see. There was no sign of the rest of them. Even Major Robinson was missing.
“What’s up?” I asked with simulated alertness and interest.
“A new contact, sir. Something big.”
“Big? How big?”
Captain Sarin shook her head and played with the screen controls. Our big screen had three long cracks in it now, but it still operated. The lower left corner was dark, however, and looked as if someone had thrown black paint over that section.
I watched the screen as the underground tunnel complex came up in wireframe. We’d mapped much of the underworld in the area of our base. We’d come to understand there were more events going on underneath the earth of Helios than there were on its surface.
I caught sight of what she was talking about almost immediately. There was something there, a long, blue thing. “That’s a new tunnel? Where did that come from?” I asked.
“No, sir,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a tunnel.”
As I watched, it moved. The entire length of it, maybe a mile or more, of what I had assumed to be a stretch of tunnel… moved. That’s when I caught on.
“It’s a granddaddy Worm, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, we think so.”
I leaned over the table and stared at it in shock. As I watched, it inched forward a few more pixels. It had to be driving through the earth beneath us as fast as a dog could run. I tapped at the screen, reading the estimates of diameter and length. I nodded my head.