against the shell of a guardian spider, my former partner pressing the muzzle of a particle-beam cannon against my helmet.
“Your combat reflex is taking over, Harris; this is why they killed off the other Liberators. You keep this up, and you’re more likely to kill us than those aliens down there.” Freeman tapped his cannon against my visor as he said this. Had he wanted to, he could have shattered the glass.
“You’re the best man we have, but I will shoot you before I let you screw this job up.”
Several things occurred to me at that moment. The first and most important was that even if I tried to kick his legs out or knocked his gun away, Freeman would shoot me without a moment’s hesitation. The next thing that ran through my head was that I was exactly like the Liberators on Albatross Island—the ones who massacred helpless prisoners and guards. Freeman was right—once I finished off the spider, my blood in a boil, I would turn on anything I could kill.
With that thought came the beginnings of self-control. My muscles slowly loosened. I allowed my hands to drop palms down on my lap.
“You back in control of yourself?” Freeman asked.
The entire company, Sweetwater included, was staring down at me. Visors hid most of their faces; but I could see Sweetwater’s expression, and he looked downright scared. I felt ashamed of myself. The funny thing was that as the reflex simmered, I felt all sorts of pains. I felt the last tremors in my shoulder and the vivid knot on the back of my head, and I felt small.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m back in control.”
Anyone else would have helped me up. Not Freeman. He took a step back and kept his cannon trained on my face. I still had the last traces of rage, and I considered trying to shoot Freeman. Something in me liked the idea of shooting all of them, even Sweetwater. Then I took a deep breath, and the last traces of my rage evaporated.
I wanted to thank Freeman. I also wanted to apologize to him. Instead, I kept quiet.
“You okay, Harris?” Major Burton asked, as we started down the tunnel.
“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.
