Dropping to the ground so that the Avatari soldiers coming along the floor of the cavern would not see me, I pulled one of the disposable flare pistols from my armor and fired an acetylene flare. The projectile moved at one-tenth the speed of a bullet, a packet of bright-burning chemical smoldering so hot that it melted anything it touched. The flare slammed into the granite fifty feet above my head, fusing itself to the rock and illuminating everything around it in white, blazing light.
With the light shining between the camouflaged spider-things and the granite wall, the spider-things showed up like islands of blackness. The guardian spiders did not have time to react before I tossed the empty flare gun, shouldered my particle-beam cannon, and hit all three of them.
“Boll, cover the walls,” I shouted. Then I thought again. Assigning a grenadier to clear the walls would almost guarantee an avalanche. “Belay that order. Peterson, out here now. Watch the walls,” I shouted as I pulled out another flare gun.
“The what?” he asked as he ran out.
“They’re spiders, damn it. They’re crawling up walls,” I said, and then I fired another flare into the wall about one hundred feet up. The light exposed dozens of guardian spiders.
“Oh, shit,” Peterson groaned and began firing. Burton and Mathis grabbed their cannons and joined him.
Still kneeling on the ground, I turned back to peer over the ledge. A hundred feet below us, dark shapes moved across the land. Closer in, a handful of Avatari soldiers stood firing in our direction.
“They’re too far for rockets,” Herrington said.
An Avatari soldier climbed over a ridge a few yards away, and I picked it off with a shot from my cannon. A few stray bolts flew in my direction. In another moment, I would need to back up for cover, but first I took a second to study the lay of the land.
“Lieutenant, we can’t stay here much longer,” Herrington said. “They’re coming.”
I had already begun to have a combat reflex. I could feel the warmth in my blood, but I had control of my rage—my thoughts were clear. It was not about hate or even survival, this time I was fighting because I had an objective.
“Freeman, I need a sniper!” I yelled into my helmet.
Without saying a word, Freeman came lumbering out of the cave pulling his rifle from over his shoulder. He dropped face-first into a crawl and moved up beside me.
“I need that ridge cleared,” I said, pointing toward an embankment. Even as I pointed, bolts flew out from behind it.
And then Freeman did something I did not mean for him to do—he pulled off his helmet. With one eye closed and the other pressed against the scope on his rifle, he sighted the aliens. Not wanting to inhale the shit in the air, he held his breath and fired several shots.
I tried to spot for Freeman as he hit enemies a thousand yards away. I saw the flash from the muzzle in peripheral vision, and one of the Avatari exploded. It looked out from behind a rock, and its head immediately burst. Another Avatari stood to fire at us. I caught the flash from Freeman’s rifle, and its chest, head, and arms flew in different directions. Freeman hit four more, dropped his rifle, and slammed his helmet back in place over his head.
I started to say something to him over the interLink, but I heard him wheezing, heard a faint moan, a deep breath. Then he wrenched his helmet from his head again, raised his rifle, sighted in on his first target, and plugged four more Avatari before running out of bullets.
He threw on his helmet. Over our link, I could hear him sucking in air as he stuffed more bullets into the magazine.
“Can’t you shoot that thing with your helmet on?” I asked.
Freeman did not answer, and the point became moot a moment later when Boll pulled out a big shoulder-fired rocket. The specking thing must have weighed thirty pounds, an aircraft-grade ordnance in a flimsy aluminum tube. Boll stood, fired, then dropped back down for cover. A moment later, the ridge the Avatari soldiers were using for cover dissolved in a bright flash.
I heard Boll laughing and cheering over an open channel on the interLink. “What the speck was that?” I asked.
“That, sir, was a thermite-tipped surface-to-air rocket,” Boll said.
“Aren’t thermite-tipped rockets illegal?” I asked.
“You brought a thermite-load down here?” Herrington asked, sounding incensed. “You’d have to be insane to strap one of those to your—”
“Lieutenant, those specking spiders are coming in behind us!” One of the riflemen in the tunnel interrupted the debate.
“Everyone out. Move! Move! Move!” I yelled. They were closing in on us, fighting more intelligently than ever before. Maybe they knew we were packing something dangerous, or maybe they just wanted to keep us out of their mines.
Boll and Herrington started back in to grab their nuke, but two of my riflemen had already replaced them. Freeman headed back for Sweetwater. There was an awkwardness to his movements. He walked with the overly solid movements of a man trying to cross a deck in stormy seas.
I dismissed it as unimportant. He’d probably burned his eyes when he took off his helmet, but I had no idea how badly. The fumes in the air may have hurt his equilibrium. I watched Sweetwater waddling toward Freeman and wondered how the little scientist had lasted this long. If a small whiff of the air had hobbled a giant like Freeman, what would it do to Sweetwater?
“Holy specking shit,” yelled one of the men still in the tunnel. The opening flashed with the green of a particle-beam weapon.
“Get out of there!” I yelled.
The men with the nukes came out followed by riflemen, but there should have been more of them. I waited three seconds, then gave Herrington the order to “seal the cave.” Anyone still in there had waited too long.
As we started down the ridge, Herrington piped a grenade into the tunnel. I cringed when I heard the explosion—it meant that we could no longer leave this hellhole the way we had come in.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Burton lost one of his riflemen, so I took a turn on point. That placed Burton, Peterson, and me on point, followed by another layer of riflemen, followed by the teams carrying the nukes. The grenadiers brought up the rear. Having handed off their nuke to two riflemen, Herrington and Boll took their places among the grenadiers.
Freeman and Sweetwater floated around our formation, sometimes meandering all the way to point to test the gas in the air, sometimes dropping back.
We did not bother with the switchback trail leading down ridge; instead we stormed down the slope, particle cannons out and blazing. We had come in with forty-nine men and were now down to forty-three, having just barely gotten our collective foot in the door. “You won’t want to waste men or bullets,” Admiral Brocius had warned me a million years ago when he handed me his pistol before briefing me on Mars. If only that bastard could be here to see just how right he had been.
Up ahead, a javelin-shaped foreleg came questing around a large boulder. I aimed my particle beam, waited for the head to appear, and fired. The shot hit one of the legs, and the spider-thing reared back on its hind legs. I charged toward it and fired again. The flash of my cannon lit up the creature’s underside, and it dropped flat.
“Freeman, where are you?” I called out on the interLink.
There was an explosion behind me and just to my left. I instinctively dropped to one knee and spun just in time to see another guardian spider tip over and drop to the ground. The bastard’s camouflage had fooled me. It was poised on a tall rock, and I had walked right below it as I attacked. The giant spider landed top down, its legs curled in, motionless on its back. That was the only time I had seen these things exhibit a truly spiderlike behavior.
I started to thank Freeman for pulling me out of that one, but that save came from Burton just a few yards
