“Freeman was right,” I said. “I’m surprised he didn’t shoot me.”
“If I were him, I wouldn’t have shot you either. It was too much fun watching you beat the shit out of that dead bug,” Burton said.
“Get specked,” I said.
“After this is done, I hope to do just that,” Burton said. “My wife’s in the Hen House.”
I laughed. It felt good. Then Sergeant Thomer said something for my ears only over a direct link. “Lieutenant, we better get moving. The guy from the lab is starting to melt.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“Holy shit, you could fit a whole city in this place,” Major Burton radioed back when he reached the end of the tunnel. “This place is too big to be the inside of anything. It’s like I’m looking across space.”
A moment later, I stood out there beside him. The spider-things had hollowed out the mountain even more than I remembered, leaving a vast blackness in its place, a hollow vault that seemed to stretch on forever.
Giving the enormous vault a cursory scan, I had to agree. I could see for miles across the desertlike floor. I looked to find the cave-within-a-cave in which Freeman and I had found the spheres and the gas …that goddamned gas. It was gone.
The last time we were there, Freeman collapsed the entrance to the inner cave; but now the whole cave was gone, and the row of spheres shone in the darkness like a string of pearls. I did not even bother trying to count the glowing orbs; the string stretched on and on, and each of those damn orbs would have gas leaking from it—enough to saturate the planet.
“It looks like your spider drones are gone,” Burton said. “The place is empty.”
From this angle the cavern did look empty. I motioned back toward Breeze with an exaggerated nod so that Burton would see the motion, then I said, “That man back there did not slip and fall.”
“No, he did not,” Burton agreed.
So we turned and stared back down at the floor of the cavern. I do not know which lenses the major used, but I tried a combination of night-for-day and telescopic lenses, a bad combination under most circumstances. This time, though, it worked well enough. As I zoomed in, I saw movement hidden in the darkness. There were drones along the cavern floor; they had just dug deep pits around themselves.
I pointed this out to Burton, who followed suit, and said, “Shit. You’re right, I see them.”
By this time the rest of the company had caught up to us. Herrington and Boll, leading one of the teams carrying a nuke, sidled up to me. “So this is it?” Boll asked.
“This is it,” I said.
“Where do we leave our packages?” Boll asked.
“See those lights out there, the spheres?”
“That’s a long way out, sir,” Boll pointed out.
“A long, dangerous way. Try zooming in on the floor down there,” I said.
“I already have,” Boll said. “Are they like the one that killed the guy back there?”
“No, those are the drones. They’re the small ones. You saw how big the one in there was.”
“Actually, sir, it was kind of hard to judge its size once you got through with it,” Boll commented.
“Yeah, sorry. I guess I lost control,” I said.
“Were you friends with that man in there?” Boll asked.
“Breeze? No, I barely knew him. He was one of the chief scientists at the lab.”
“So he was friends with Dr. Sweetwater?” Boll asked. They all treated William Sweetwater like an old acquaintance. In the short time that I had mistakenly left the dwarf scientist unguarded, he had won them over.
“Yes, they were friends.”
Freeman and Sweetwater waited in the shelter of the tunnel while the rest of us admired the size of the cavern. When I saw them, I radioed Freeman, and said, “I don’t suppose we can detonate the bombs off from up here.”
I watched them—Freeman kneeling to speak, Sweetwater considering the question. He pulled out the handheld meter, waved it in the air, then shined his penlight on it. He walked out to the ridge, squeezing between a couple of Marines, waved his meter in the air again, and shook his head.
Freeman bent down to see what the meter said. “We need to get closer.”
“How close?” I asked.
Freeman and Sweetwater traded words. “Right up to the gas.”
“Wonderful.” I sighed though I had expected that answer all along.
Staring at the closest sphere, I could just make out the uneven carpet of gas bleeding out of it. Out of the side of my eye, I caught a glimpse of something moving along the cavern floor. I reacted instinctively. “Grenadiers forward. Rifles, cover the rear. Freeman, get Sweetwater back in the tunnel.”
Just that quickly, the shooting began.
“Holy shit, there must be ten million of those bastards down there,” said Herrington, the kind of Marine who normally downplayed the situation. That pretty much summed it up, though.
Eight of us remained on the ridge, including Herrington and Boll, who ran their nuke into the tunnel for safety, then came back out ready to fight. Below us, a small army of guardians and Avatari soldiers appeared out of nowhere. They poured out of trenches and climbed over dunes. Bolts of light seemed to generate out of thin air and fly at us. In the time it took me to hit my first target, three of my men went down.
Bolts of white light streaked through the dark air like fireworks. They were so bright against the darkness that they left echoes etched in my visor.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something fall. Memory and instinct taking over, I stepped forward, spun, and scanned the wall above us; but I saw nothing. The bastards knew how to camouflage themselves, but I had come prepared.
Dropping to the ground so that the Avatari soldiers coming along the floor of the cavern would not see me, I pulled one of the disposable flare pistols from my armor and fired an acetylene flare. The projectile moved at one-tenth the speed of a bullet, a packet of bright-burning chemical smoldering so hot that it melted anything it touched. The flare slammed into the granite fifty feet above my head, fusing itself to the rock and illuminating everything around it in white, blazing light.
With the light shining between the camouflaged spider-things and the granite wall, the spider-things showed up like islands of blackness. The guardian spiders did not have time to react before I tossed the empty flare gun, shouldered my particle-beam cannon, and hit all three of them.
“Boll, cover the walls,” I shouted. Then I thought again. Assigning a grenadier to clear the walls would almost guarantee an avalanche. “Belay that order. Peterson, out here now. Watch the walls,” I shouted as I pulled out another flare gun.
“The what?” he asked as he ran out.
“They’re spiders, damn it. They’re crawling up walls,” I said, and then I fired another flare into the wall about one hundred feet up. The light exposed dozens of guardian spiders.
“Oh, shit,” Peterson groaned and began firing. Burton and Mathis grabbed their cannons and joined him.
Still kneeling on the ground, I turned back to peer over the ledge. A hundred feet below us, dark shapes moved across the land. Closer in, a handful of Avatari soldiers stood firing in our direction.
“They’re too far for rockets,” Herrington said.
An Avatari soldier climbed over a ridge a few yards away, and I picked it off with a shot from my cannon. A few stray bolts flew in my direction. In another moment, I would need to back up for cover, but first I took a second to study the lay of the land.
“Lieutenant, we can’t stay here much longer,” Herrington said. “They’re coming.”
I had already begun to have a combat reflex. I could feel the warmth in my blood, but I had control of my rage—my thoughts were clear. It was not about hate or even survival, this time I was fighting because I had an objective.
“Freeman, I need a sniper!” I yelled into my helmet.