Extinction

-51-

“Worms, Colonel Riggs! Zillions of ‘em!”

I heard the override shout in my headset, it came in over the command channel without the speaker identifying himself. It had to be one of my drill-tank pilots, I figured. This calculation proved correct, as I heard the drill-tank farthest up the line, the one I had sent into the tunnel first, begin firing. Rather than the steady pulsing beam of the drill, which was built to burn rock a few feet from the nosecone of the tank, the beam unit could be focused further forward to be used as a short-range weapon.

“Report!” I shouted, running now toward the front of our column. Heavy footsteps behind me indicated Kwon was right on my heels. “Is that you, Yamada? Specify enemy contact.”

More firing erupted ahead of me. I thought it was coming from the second drill-tank in line.

“Broken through—into some kind of chamber,” came the response. His labored breath blew over the microphone. “This is Major Yamada, lead tank, reporting.”

“All tanks, stop drilling,” I ordered. “Withdraw into the main tunnel. We’ve made a breakthrough.”

“They’ve got something big they are rolling up, sir. I can’t focus that far back.”

I grimaced. Out of range? That indicated Yamada had opened up a seriously large chamber. The tank’s nosecone weapon should be able to effectively strike at a range of at least two hundred yards.

I arrived, puffing and pushing past a clot of marines. They were trying to support the drill-tank, but couldn’t get around it in the narrow, freshly-bored tunnel. Yamada was backing out, and marines were dodging to get out of the way. He never made it, however. I heard a heavy thump, then the front of the tank exploded. It had been hit by a shell of some kind and knocked out.

My little Nano tanks were deadly at range, but they were not heavily-armored. I’d always known that if they were hit by something serious, their two inches of front-facing nanite armor would fold inward like cardboard.

“Yamada?” I shouted, but there was no response. He was probably dead in there.

I switched my voice-out to local, and shouted at the men around me. “Grab this thing and pull it back. We can’t let them have time to organize and attack.”

A dozen powerful hands gripped the tank anyway we could. Normally, Nano machines were smooth and rounded in every dimension. This one had been hit, however, and looked like a splashed mass of metal. Frozen with flanges sticking out in every direction, I could tell the brainbox had been hit. The nanites had no instructions, and so held their chains where the enemy shell had left them.

Another thump sounded. “Duck!” I shouted.

The second shell struck the mass of the drill-tank. The dead hulk bucked backward, pushing me off my feet. More nanite metal splashed everywhere, some of it burning. Whatever they were firing at us, it was incendiary. Gouts of molten metal twisted in the air and crawled on the tunnel floor as if alive—in a way, I supposed that it was. The squirming metal rained back into the tunnel where the marines and the surviving drill-tanks had assembled, pooling up into beads on the floor. The nanite droplets fell amongst us and sounded like handfuls of thrown coins.

“Heave!” I shouted, climbing to my feet, grabbing the wrecked tank with both gloved fists and pulling hard. More marines helped, including Kwon with his ham-sized fists. The tank moved. A grating sound indicated some success. The metal flanges scraped the smoking sides of the tunnel.

“All together now,” roared Kwon, “On three—one, two, THREE!”

We all heaved and the tank ripped loose like a bad tooth. Screeching, it came out of the tunnel like a nail being pulled out of a board. Roaring, we kept pulling, dragging it rapidly. Within thirty seconds, we had it out in the main tunnel, and we could see what it was we faced.

I saw nothing, at first glance. The tunnel was pitch-black. There were no Worms, or anything else. Great, I thought. They were resetting their ambush.

Pulling my head back so a sniper couldn’t take me out, I signaled my men to take cover. We stood on either side of the tunnel, hugging the walls. I breathed hard for a few seconds, trying to think. All we’d managed to do is open up a flank for ourselves. We had over five miles to go to get to the center of this Mountain—and that was only counting straight, horizontal space. We were in a three-dimensional fight now. We could go up or down, and so could they. I had no doubt this mountain was riddled with traps and tricks and the Worms were busy making more every second, now that they knew which direction we were coming from and where we were headed. They would whittle us down, making us pay for every advance. At this rate, it would be a month and countless dead before we could reach the goal. The trouble with that was, I didn’t have countless men—I didn’t have a month, either.

I looked ahead down the main tunnel. Should I just press ahead and fight our way through whatever they had planned for us on the main route? Or should we fight our way into this narrow side passage and try to do the unexpected? After about a minute of hard thinking, I decided to punt and feel my way through the situation. We’d give the Worms something to think about and see how they wanted to play it.

“Drill-tanks, I need two more units up here. Drill me two more holes, right next to this one. I want you hiding on either side of this shaft. If the Worms rush through to this tunnel, you will break through and hit their flanks.”

The drill-tanks rolled up and began working on the walls. I called for my sensor unit officer. Lieutenant Chen came up, dragging her wheeled equipment behind her. She set it up at a safe distance, aimed the pick-up nubs at the walls and worked the interface.

“I can’t see past these thick walls. The material is very dense.”

“I gathered that,” I said.

“The density drops off, however, about fifty feet in. I can’t tell what’s there, only a few shadowy contacts are registering. But the echoes indicate lower density. It could be a cavity, or low-pressure material. Something about as thick as sawdust.”

“Or Worm-meat,” I suggested.

Chen nodded after a moment. “Could be.”

“Sir,” said Kwon, lumbering up to me. “There’s something going on inside the drilled tunnel.”

I trotted to the mouth of the tunnel that led, reportedly, to a zillion Worms. I waved my hands for quiet and ordered the drill-tanks to idle. Steam wisped and churned. A choking cloud of vaporized rock clung to the ceiling. We waited, quietly.

I heard something then, after turning up the exterior pickups on my suit. Kwon voiced my own thoughts, having heard it as well.

“Something—slithering, sir,” he said behind me.

I waved for him to shut up. For once, he did. We all waited. Something slithered closer.

The unseen Worm made a final rush as we held back quietly. I was stunned when I saw it come out of the tunnel. It was huge. This was no twelve-foot baby Worm. This was a granddaddy, a titan of a Worm. It reared immediately and the two guns on its sides spoke. Marines tried to scatter, but it was too late.

Double thumps sounded—except at this close range, they were booms not thumps. Incendiary shells fired independently into my clumped together troops at close range. Blood, bone and scraps of gear exploded, leaving black marks on the hard, ribbed floor of the great tunnel.

We lit it up, of course, with a hundred burning beams of light. Our lasers lanced the beast, hissed into thick skin, blackened it, and then bored deep into the monster’s flesh. Men held down their triggers, screaming in rage or fear or both. Beams shot through the great tube of squirming meat and burst out the far side seconds later.

It did not die easily, however. The twin great cannons on either side of it chugged, reloading themselves. I fired at the mechanism, hoping to disable it before it could get off another shot. The Worm turned in my direction. Could it have realized my plan to destroy its armament? I’ll never know. It lunged forward with one heaving motion, struggling to function now, due to the vast number of wounds in its body. The great head dipped down, and to my horror Lieutenant Chen was swallowed almost in her entirety. The strange, horizontally opposed jaws opened and shut, chopping her off at the feet. Two boots and gray-white shinbones were left, sheared off and still standing on the tunnel floor.

We kept beaming, and it sagged down, convulsing and thrashing. Men were tossed about in wild confusion, dodging the monster and beaming it until it was only a quivering, steaming mass of meat.

Long before it stopped shivering, however, a new wave of Worms arrived. Nowhere near as big as the monster we’d just finished, but large enough to ride bareback, this wave seemed endless. They were unarmed, fortunately. They had only their snapping jaws and mandibles.

We backed up into a circle and burned them as they came by the hundreds.

“Drill-tanks in the side tunnels, break through!” I shouted, and heard the big boring lasers fire up.

The Worms kept coming, ignoring the sounds in the newly bored tunnels on either side. I was very glad I could not smell the burning gore or feel it, slick and greasy on my hands.

The two drill-tanks ended the rush of Worms. We slaughtered them. Hundreds, perhaps thousands died. I had to give them their due, they didn’t mind dying for their home. Not for the first time, as I stood slipping on the wet floors, I doubted the ethics of our mission. Was Earth so worthwhile that we should wantonly destroy other species on other worlds to ensure our survival? How many other worlds would my boots tread upon, how many mass-murders would I be responsible for, following the heartless orders of the Macros?

I pushed these debilitating thoughts aside and tried to focus on the goal. If we could get to the heart of the place, hopefully killing as few Worms as possible, we could be done with this mission and out of here. I suspected the strategic value of the mountain’s heart was industrial. Perhaps it was the last factory they had that could produce nuclear mines. Maybe, if we took it out, the Macros would leave the rest of the Worm population alone as they could no long obstruct the rings and disrupt Macro fleets. I told myself that whatever it was, all of this would soon be over with. I don’t like to lie to myself, but sometimes, it’s necessary.

The tunnel we’d bored through first was so choked with Worm bodies, I ordered the drill-tanks in the side tunnels to make new passages. When they broke through, a rush of men followed them. We entered a vast underground chamber. It had artifacts, here and there, the first Worm artifacts I’d seen.

“What the heck is this?” asked Kwon, stumping up to me with an oddly-shaped lump of resin in his hands. The thing looked like a melted tree-branch, or a bone made of candlewax.

I took the object and examined it closely. I had no concept of its significance. It did not look like a natural formation, however. Someone had created this on purpose. My men were wandering the chamber, using their suit-lights to examine the walls. They pointed and poked at the artifacts they found. There were ovals on the walls, with dark reliefs formed inside the ovals. These reliefs were delicate, and when my men reached out and poked at them, they broke and crumbled.

“I bet they make these,” said Kwon, “with spit or something.”

I looked at him sharply, then looked back at the walls and the ceiling. I ran my suit lights over a dozen ovals and sculpted shapes that stood apart here and there, rising up from the floor like stalagmites.

“Hands off, everyone!” I ordered. Men moved quickly. They backed away from the walls and pulled out their weapons. Beamers glowed, their targeting dots shining red on a hundred spots.

“No,” I said, “they aren’t dangerous. These are—pieces of art. This is some kind of gallery, or museum. Don’t damage anything further. No souvenirs.”

A few men dropped twisting sculptures of brown resin. Kwon came up to me and leaned close.

“This don’t look like art to me, sir,” he said, using his usual, overly-loud whisper. He reached out to touch a flaky sculpture with his thick fingers. Pieces of it crumbled as he poked at it.

“I know. But a lot of what I find in museums doesn’t look like art to me, either. To a Worm mind, maybe this is priceless. Maybe that big Worm was the librarian, and the others were on a field trip from school.”

Kwon gave a halting, honking laugh. I didn’t bother to argue my point further with him. Few of my men seemed to be troubled by the fact we were invading the city of another biotic species and wrecking the place. The Worms were just too different, I supposed. For most people, they engendered no sympathy.

“Enough dawdling. Let’s move out. Wounded get to ride in the drill-tanks. No faking. Kwon, get my team moving. Put anyone who breaks more stuff in here on point.”

My last order got a response from the men. No one wanted to be on point. Kwon, shouting and slamming his great hands together to make booming noises, got everyone moving again. We found a tunnel out of this place and set a drill-tank to digging right through the wall of it. I aimed it as straight as I could. No more fooling around, we were going to bore our way to the central chamber—whatever it was—and get this mission finished. A few of the frescoes and reliefs broke as the drill-tank fired up. I gritted my teeth and felt slightly sick about it. What would a pack of humans at the Smithsonian look like to an army of Worms? Would they be capable of respect and mercy? I couldn’t be sure, but I figured any beings that valued art must have some kind of higher aspirations.