Extinction

-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.

“I’d been wondering, the whole time I was down in the Worm mound, what Worm had made those big tunnels. Now we know.”

“We’ve got about eighteen minutes at its current approach velocity,” said Captain Sarin. She sounded as drained and defeated as Sandra had when I’d found her.

“Let me guess where it came from, and where it’s headed,” I said, doing the math. The tail of it pointed toward the mountain. The head of it pointed directly at us.

“What can we do, sir?” Captain Sarin asked.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll beat it.”

“You really think we can kill something that big, sir?”

“No. But maybe we can outrun it.”

One would not think a loading process could be sped up dramatically, but we did it. In such situations, it’s all a matter of priorities. I threw every moving marine I had under the weight of bricks, straining and heaving to help the loaders. We took the essentials first: our air purifiers, water units, generators and the factories. A lot of the sleeping units would have to be left behind, which made up half the bricks we had. I had a lot fewer marines to put into them now, anyway.

I didn’t bother reconfiguring the last five drill-tanks I had. We just put them into service, opening them up into clam-shells and put a brick on the back. Then we set a lot of men to shoving until the revving drill-tanks slid, scraped and bumped their way up the ramp. The bricks were unloaded into the Macro hold by unceremoniously dumping them out. We didn’t even bother to stack them, we just turned on the clamps and went for the next brick.

By the time the giant Worm was about a minute from arrival, and had begun to dig upward toward the bottom of our base, we’d managed to get over a third of our bricks into the hold. I decided it was high time to contact the Macros and tell them to lift off.

“Macro Command, this is Kyle Riggs. Respond.”

“Unnecessary communications are wasteful of system resources.”

“Right you are, and this is not a waste of time. Close the transport doors and lift off.”

“All ground forces are not aboard.”

“You are incorrect, Macro Command.”

“All ground forces are not aboard.”

“Sir,” said Captain Sarin at my side. “I think they mean the bricks and equipment we left behind.”

“Macro Command, we are abandoning a portion of our equipment to escape the incoming mega-biotic enemy,” I said, realizing I’d coined a new word: mega-biotic. I hoped it wasn’t going to be one I would be using often.

There was a hesitation. That was all the time our Worm friend needed, however. It broke through our thin shielding of nanite-woven materials, lifting it up like a sheet of paper. Bricks heaved and were tossed twirling like matchboxes. A gout of dirt, rocks and debris flew into the hold itself. Men scrambled for cover.

The Worm itself was tremendous. I’d spent too much of my youth watching movies about giant creatures destroying cities. Here was one worthy of the task. Its maw flipped open, tossing out gouts of brown liquid. The orifice was big enough to swallow one of our bricks whole, without chewing.

The creature did not roar, but the ground at its base did. Everyone was showered with clods and wet clumps of unidentified matter. A tossed brick, falling end over end, crashed down upon the Macro ramp with an ear-splitting crash.

The sky lit up with a hundred beams of energy, darkening my goggles. Major Robinson had set up a number of automated mini-turrets using the heavy beam packs my troops had given up in favor of their lighter kits. He’d added a brainbox to control them, and fastened them atop the outer ring of bricks that formed our base wall. These turrets fired now, cutting dark lines in the endless mass of flesh that towered a hundred feet up in the middle of our wrecked base. More small turrets were manned by marines. These needed only a tripod, a beam unit and a generator. Too heavy to be carried on this world, they could still be operated by a marine as a stationary gun emplacement. Robinson himself set one of these up as I watched on top of a brick in the hold. He and a dozen others fired at the giant Worm that shaded us from the red sun with its bulk.

The Worm shuddered in reaction. I could tell it had never felt the burning sensation of our weapons before. Unfortunately, the output of our weapons was nowhere near enough to kill it. Enraged, the Worm began to thrash and struck down with its flashing feet, each the size of a man. Bricks tumbled and crashed. The beams kept flashing, cooking Wormskin and the wet meat beneath.

“Abandonment of equipment without cause weakens the value of the ground forces,” said the Macro Command voice calmly.

“You’ve got to get us out of here, sir!” said Captain Sarin, screaming to be heard.

I thought hard, my eyes wide. “Marines, you may fire at will!” I commanded.

More beams leapt up, stinging the monster. We only managed to anger it further. Mad with pain, it writhed and snapped with greater energy. I realized, as it destroyed my encampment, it was only a matter of time until the Worm turned toward the Macro ship. With the hold doors open and with us inside, it would no doubt come in here for a snack. I knew from experience the big ones didn’t die easily. And this one looked to be about ten times the size of any I’d seen before.

I decided to give Macro Command one more chance to see reason. “We have no need for the abandoned equipment,” I said, shouting into my link to be heard over the crash and roar of the great Worm. “Fighting this biotic would cost us more in terms of effectiveness than leaving the equipment will cost us.”

Another hesitation. It seemed to be a very long one, but perhaps that was only because the Worm was twisting about, looking for fresh prey. Then the head turned, and lunged directly into the Macro hold.

“Abandonment of equipment without cause weakens the value of the ground forces.”

“Sir!” buzzed Major Robinson in my ear. “I think we can take it down, sir. You brought two hovertanks back from the mountain. If we concentrate their fire at the head—”

“No,” I said. “Man your post.”

“Why not, Colonel?” Robinson demanded in exasperation.

“Because the Worm has already destroyed our last hovertanks. Only a few drill-tanks are left, and they haven’t got the range.”

The great head dipped down into the Macro ship twice more. Each time a beam turret, along with a marine and the brick he stood upon was removed.

“Macro Command, my forces are being erased. It is imperative that we take off right now.”

“Abandonment of equipment without cause weakens the value of the ground forces.”

“I assure you, we will still be an effective fighting force!” I shouted into my microphone. My words were relayed up to Macro Command.

More marines were devoured—their beamers and bricks all sucked into the monster’s maw without a trace.

“Assurance accepted. Lift-off imminent.”

I didn’t have time to ponder exactly why the Macros changed their mind. I figured I would worry about that later.

“Everybody back away from the doors!” I roared. My men retreated deeper into the dark hold, firing as they went.