What was left of my company fanned out to form a perimeter while Freeman helped Sweetwater open his canvas bag and fish out equipment. I took my place along the perimeter, my back to the light, looking out into a darkness in which monsters lurked and stealing an occasional glance at Freeman and Sweetwater. One time I looked over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of Freeman dragging the scientist toward the spot where the gas came to the edge of the rocks. When I looked back again, I saw Freeman pulling some kind of cylinder out of Sweetwater’s canvas bag. There were more cylinders on the ground, a whole pile of them. Freeman showed the cylinder he was holding to Sweetwater and the scientist shook his head.
Out in the distance, white bolts and green flashes were visible. One of my men was still alive out there, probably Thomer. A spider moved in the nearby shadows. Herrington raised a rocket to fire at it, but I hit it first with my particle-beam cannon.
“Nice shooting, sir,” Herrington said.
Behind me, Freeman lay flat on his stomach and held one of the cylinders as far over the gas as he could. He brought the cylinder back and showed it to Sweetwater.
A bolt struck Private Ferris in the chest, and he crumpled. Herrington and I both returned fire, but the company was now down to six men. As I thought about it, for all intents and purposes, the magic number was five. Sweetwater could not possibly live much longer.
“Harrrisss.” The voice whispering over the interLink sounded more like wind than someone speaking. “Harrrrisss.” I would have dismissed the message as my imagination, but the name “Freeman” appeared on my visor.
I turned and saw both Freeman and Sweetwater staring in my direction. They had removed the nuclear device from its outer shell, and Sweetwater was sitting on the ground beside the disassembled bomb while Freeman knelt over him.
“Shoot anything that moves,” I told Herrington and Grubb, the last of my grenadiers. I went and knelt beside Sweetwater.
Stripped from its shell, the bomb looked like a rock tumbler—a spherical canister with chrome piping and lots of wires. It had a little keypad, which Freeman must have used to program the explosion. Sweetwater could not have set the bomb; his fingers had swollen to the point of bursting.
The red LED above the keypad said 20:00.
The goggles had done a fair job of protecting Sweetwater’s eyes. The lids of his eyes were heavily swollen, and the whites of his eyes had mostly turned the color of blood, but he could see. Through the fog in his oxygen mask, I saw that blisters had formed on Sweetwater’s lips around his mouth.
The scientist beckoned with both hands for me to come closer, so I bent down even lower until my helmet was practically against his face.
“What do you think, Harris? Would we have made a good Marine?” he asked.
“I still like you better as a scientist,” I said. He chuckled, a painfully dry sound rising up from his throat.
“You’d make a shitty scientist, Lieutenant. You kill everything you see,” Sweetwater croaked. Then he motioned me even closer. “The case …the case around the device. We’ve set the device to explode in twenty minutes. Put the bomb in the gas.”
“The gas won’t destroy the bomb?” I asked.
Sweetwater shook his head. “Not fast.”
Even if the Avatari knew what we had and went looking for it, I doubted they would find the nuke in the gas. “You know, Sweetwater,” I said. “I was wrong, you’d make a hell of a Marine.”
Sweetwater coughed up something that looked like blood. “Run fast. Maybe you can make it out.”
I wanted to tell him that we’d take him out with us, but I knew better, and so did he.
“The clock starts when you close the case. You better run fast,” he said.
I toyed with the idea of simply setting the bomb off, then I looked at that clock again. If we made a mad dash and the aliens did not pin us in their cross fire, we could probably reach the transport in ten minutes, maybe less. A mile to the slope, a short uphill sprint, then out to the transport.
“The nuke’s on a twenty-minute timer,” I said on an open frequency. “What do you think? Do we stay here, or make a break for it?”
“Think we can make it out?” Grubb asked.
“Maybe we should guard the bomb till it explodes. This whole thing is for nothing if the aliens disarm it,” said Herrington.
“They won’t,” I said, “I’m throwing it into the gas.”
“Well, in that case, I wouldn’t mind collecting my back pay,” Herrington said.
“Yeah, me too,” I said.
I started to slide the inner mechanism of the nuke back in the sleeve, then stopped. Once I closed it, there would be no time to do anything but chuck the nuke in the gas and run, and there was something I needed to do.
A guardian spider dropped off a wall and landed on Private Neery. Herrington and Grubb shot the creature, but Neery was already dead.
Sweetwater lay on his stomach looking away from me toward the spheres. Sure that he could not see me, I slowly pulled out my pistol. The man had suffered too much. I wanted to end his suffering and seal the bomb, but I hesitated before pulling the trigger, and he turned and saw me.
He reached for me with the wad of raw meat that had once been his hand.
“Our gun,” was all he said.
“You’re an amazing man, Dr. Sweetwater,” I said as I aimed my pistol at his head. I had not yet laid my finger across the trigger. I hated what I was about to do.
Freeman pushed my gun away. He dug through the scientist’s canvas bag and pulled out Sweetwater’s small-caliber pistol. Freeman placed the gun in Sweetwater’s hand, then gently closed the little scientist’s fingers around the toy. Through the clear plastic of his oxygen mask, a faint smile formed across Sweetwater’s bloodstained mouth.
“Turn us over,” he called to Freeman, sounding like a sick child.
Freeman carefully rolled him onto his stomach and stretched his arms out so that he looked like a soldier lying in wait. During their time alone in the cockpit, Sweetwater and Freeman must have discussed how the scientist wanted to die.
Herrington looked back over the scene, and said, “Good luck, Doc,” on an open channel that everyone but Sweetwater could hear. “It’s too bad they don’t clone natural-borns; we could use an entire battalion of men like you.”
As I started to slide the nuke into its sleeve, I saw Freeman gently pat Sweetwater on the back. The little pistol fell from his hand, and I knew William Sweetwater had died.
“Okay, boys, I’m going to start the timer. On my mark, start running and shooting, and don’t stop till you’ve reached the transport,” I said.
I heard a round of aye-ayes.
For a brief moment, it seemed like everything would work out, then the world around us suddenly became brighter. I turned and saw that the long line of spheres had begun to dilate; and worse, I saw the yellow outlines of Avatari soldiers inside each sphere.
Half-convinced the bomb would explode the moment I reassembled it, I shoved the inner mechanism back into its sleeve. The window on the outside of the outer cylinder showed that the clock had begun to count down the moment the innards snapped into place. I noted the time in my visor and sprang to my feet.
“Go!” I yelled.
Behind me, Avatari energy forms began marching out of the spheres. There must have been thousands of them, and there might have been tens of thousands more waiting to emerge. They were behind us, not between us and our way back to the transport, and they were slow. If we ran quickly, I thought we might still make it out.
Grabbing the handles on either end of the nuke, I hefted it off the ground, but I was weak from the march down here. I had trouble lifting the damn thing, and I had to wrestle it toward the gas. Less than a hundred feet away from me, more glowing yellow soldiers took form and emerged from the spheres—an army of creatures made of nothing but energy. Seeing the Avatari step into the knee-deep carpet of gas that surrounded the spheres, I had a moment’s hope that the gas would dissolve them.