I couldn’t kill the damned thing. If I shot and it fell on me, it would crush me under its bulk. If it touched me with its leg, my armor would short out, and I’d be blind.
The guardian lashed at me with a foreleg. I rolled to the other side of the hole and shot at the bastard’s head. The spider reeled but did not fall, so I shot out its legs. The guardian fell backward, out of the hole. I did not waste time looking to see what happened to it.
“Cut your way through,” I called over an open frequency. The message was mostly for Burton and Peterson—the men on point—but it was also meant for Boll and Herrington, our best grenadiers. I ran ahead until I had a clear view of the spot Herrington hit with that thermite rocket. I don’t know how many Avatari had been there, but they were all gone now.
The grenadiers led our formation, with Burton and his riflemen coming up next. They had formed a tight circle around Sweetwater and the nukes. Even from a distance, I could see that Freeman was carrying William Sweetwater like a mother carrying a child.
Targeting guardians and drones, I cut across the ground between me and the rest of the company, leaping over holes and rocks, and skirting boulders. Somewhere in the distance, the Avatari regrouped and began shooting at us. Light bolts tore into two men behind me. As I turned to sight the aliens, I saw another of my riflemen fall.
My grenadiers went to work, firing rocket after rocket into the path to clear the way. The explosions cast a staccato of flashes across the bleak cavern. Their rockets exploded, sending twisting columns of smoke that rose from the ground and evaporated into the blackness.
In the flash from the rockets, I saw more guardians moving in the distance. “What the hell is it going to take to break through, damn it!” I yelled in frustration. I turned to look at the ridge to our rear and saw ten Avatari standing on an outcropping. Freeman cut down three of them. A dozen sparkling green beams demolished the others as the riflemen in the rear opened fire. The Avatari shot back at us, and I lost two more of my men.
The riflemen were falling back as the grenadiers forced their way ahead. “Stay together! Stay together!” I yelled.
Burton repeated the order.
Thomer fell back to help Freeman.
We found a twenty-foot rise that seemed to run the length of the cavern and climbed it. Along the crest of that rise I could see the light from the spheres as it traveled along its spine. We had to stick to the rise—the ground around us was buried under a layer of drones working so close together that their legs touched. The rise, though, left us as exposed as a can on a post in a shooting gallery.
“They’re all around us!” one of my men screamed. That was our only warning that we had waded into the horde. The next moment guardian spiders started climbing up the sides of our path.
“They’re coming in close,” Herrington called over the interLink.
I barely had time to issue the order to switch to pistols before the guardian spiders began climbing the rise. Private Grossman, one of the men carrying the nukes, stood in the two o’ clock position in our formation. When a guardian charged the circle from eleven o’clock, he and the three other men carrying the nuke shot it. He was still looking at the guardian they killed when another spider lashed out at him from the top of a twenty-foot shelf. His armor split, and he screamed in pain. The guardian slashed at him again and would have stabbed him clean through, but Herrington shot it.
Blind and scared, Grossman threw off his helmet. He inhaled a lungful of the poisoned air and dropped to one knee.
“Simmons …” I said. The man instinctively knew what I meant. He aimed his pistol at Grossman. “Sorry, pal,” he whispered as he fired a single shot, which caused Grossman’s head to explode. I did not know if being hit in the head by a particle beam was painless, but I was certain it beat the hell out of running around blind as the acid in the air melted you inside and out.
With only a hundred yards to go, the light from the spheres was so bright that my visor automatically switched to tactical view. Now I could see colors. I could see the black-gray spiders against the flat black rock.
A white bolt struck Thompson, the Marine walking next to me. He spun around and fell to the ground, lying there convulsing for a moment, then slumping into death. Another bolt struck Robison, one of the men lugging a nuke. It hit him in the head, and he fell dead and rolled down the hill. The other men handling that nuke lost their balance and slid after him, dragging the nuke in their wake.
“Cover me,” Thomer shouted. He dropped on his ass and slid down the side of the rise. At least a half dozen of those spider-thing drones scurried along his path. I shot three; Burton might have hit five. We might have been down to two dozen men now. A bolt hit a man to my left a moment later, and we were down one more.
I spotted the Avatari trooper coming toward us, and fired.
“Boll, Herrington—cover our ass side,” I shouted. “Use grenades, and don’t worry about the trip home.” The trip home was the last of our concerns. Herrington managed to pick off two Avatari a moment later. Boll took a bolt in the head and rolled into a hole with a drone. The giant spider-thing did not see him when it stabbed its leg through Boll’s stomach and scratched at the ground flinging his corpse around like a rag. As it continued to dig, the spider-thing tore Corporal Boll in half.
“Get up here!” I yelled at Thomer, as he struggled to climb the side of the rise carrying the hundred-pound nuke. Bolts flew around us. Another grenadier fell.
I shouted for Freeman.
Ray came toward me, still carrying Sweetwater in the crook of his right arm. He dropped to one knee and reached for Thomer with his left. Instead of grabbing the big man’s arm, Thomer handed him the nuke. He did not attempt to climb the hill. Instead, he turned, pulled out his pistol, and began shooting spider-things.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Get going,” Thomer said. “I’ll catch you on the way out.”
“Sure,” I said. “Catch you on the way out.”
Three riflemen came forward and took the nuke. I was about to ask for a fourth man and realized these were the only ones I had left. We were down to twelve men—three men lugging one nuke and four lugging the other, Herrington watching the rear, Burton, Freeman, Sweetwater, and me.
We ran ahead as quickly as we could, stumbling along the top of the rise until we reached the spheres. A guardian sprang up to block our way, and I shot it. I shot it again and again because even though it was dead, it still blocked our path. The three men carrying the first of the nukes managed to snake their way around it, but the four-man team carrying the second bomb lost their footing and rolled down the side of the rise. They vanished into the darkness.
I could not go back to help them. Stray bolts flew through the air around us, and we had to move on. I did not see where they fell, and could not find so much as their virtual dog tags. Things were unraveling so quickly. By the time we reached the spheres, Burton was gone. Where we lost him, I had no idea.
Of the forty-nine of us that had left Valhalla that morning, only seven of us remained to place the bomb.
CHAPTER FIFTY
The line of spheres stretched out in both directions, an endless string of glowing balls simultaneously emitting crystalline white light and oozing brown sludge. The light from the spheres shone over the swampy puddle of the gas like overbright moonlight. The cave that had once covered the spheres had vanished, and only its footprint remained—a half-pipe trench partially filled by a layer of gas.
Still silent, Freeman carried Sweetwater to the outside edge of that trench and lowered him to the ground.
“Is he even alive?” Herrington asked me.
We got our answer when the scientist sank to his knees but remained vertical. Looking at the clock in my visor, I saw that only twenty minutes had passed since we had entered the Avatari dig. It didn’t seem possible. It felt like the entire universe had changed in those twenty short minutes.