off.
Crouching low and darting for cover, I tried to find a path that offered me cover as I circled around the Avatari. I sent messages as I ran, telling Burton and the rest of the company to move toward the spheres whether my plan worked or not. The clock was ticking; in the next few minutes every one of us might well die whether we succeeded or not.
Some sharp-eyed specker of an Avatari spotted me as I made my way toward a wall. A bolt missed my shoulder by inches. As I dived for cover in a trench, a bolt hit the rifle I kept strapped to my back. A few bolts flew over my head, then the attack simply stopped.
I peered out from the trench in time to see Ray Freeman stowing his particle-beam cannon. Freeman, murderous son of a bitch that he was, may have been the best man I had ever known.
I had already wasted seconds I could not afford. With Freeman as my guardian angel and trusting that none of the other Avatari had noticed me, I sprang from the trench and sprinted across open ground. At first I had a clear path, then one of the drone spider-things crawled out of a hole. I jumped left to avoid it, and the shooting began. Bolts flew through the air around me, not just one or two, but en masse. Four, maybe five bolts struck a rock ledge not more than twenty feet from me. The ledge exploded with such force that it threw me into a waist-deep hole.
Over the interLink, I heard Boll talking to Herrington.
“He makes a good distraction,” Boll said.
“Shhh! I’m looking for my shot. I’ve waited my whole life to fire off one of these thermite jobs. It’s kind of a life’s ambition.”
In order for Herrington to hit the target, I would need to distract the bastards. I placed my virtual beacon, then I sprang from cover. Bolts streaked around me, but they could not get a clear shot at me because I ran between rocks and stayed low to the ground. One bolt passed just a few inches from my face.
“Hey, there’s the beacon,” Herrington said.
“Fire the specking thing!” Boll shouted.
The flash Herrington’s thermite rocket made seemed to make the world around me disappear. I had no idea if he had cleared the enemy stronghold, and I would need to go in to make sure the path was secure. As I lay facedown preparing to leap out, the dark form of a guardian appeared over the lip of the hole. It slashed at me with one of its forelegs, but I managed to jump out of its reach.
I couldn’t kill the damned thing. If I shot and it fell on me, it would crush me under its bulk. If it touched me with its leg, my armor would short out, and I’d be blind.
The guardian lashed at me with a foreleg. I rolled to the other side of the hole and shot at the bastard’s head. The spider reeled but did not fall, so I shot out its legs. The guardian fell backward, out of the hole. I did not waste time looking to see what happened to it.
“Cut your way through,” I called over an open frequency. The message was mostly for Burton and Peterson— the men on point—but it was also meant for Boll and Herrington, our best grenadiers. I ran ahead until I had a clear view of the spot Herrington hit with that thermite rocket. I don’t know how many Avatari had been there, but they were all gone now.
The grenadiers led our formation, with Burton and his riflemen coming up next. They had formed a tight circle around Sweetwater and the nukes. Even from a distance, I could see that Freeman was carrying William Sweetwater like a mother carrying a child.
Targeting guardians and drones, I cut across the ground between me and the rest of the company, leaping over holes and rocks, and skirting boulders. Somewhere in the distance, the Avatari regrouped and began shooting at us. Light bolts tore into two men behind me. As I turned to sight the aliens, I saw another of my riflemen fall.
My grenadiers went to work, firing rocket after rocket into the path to clear the way. The explosions cast a staccato of flashes across the bleak cavern. Their rockets exploded, sending twisting columns of smoke that rose from the ground and evaporated into the blackness.
In the flash from the rockets, I saw more guardians moving in the distance. “What the hell is it going to take to break through, damn it!” I yelled in frustration. I turned to look at the ridge to our rear and saw ten Avatari standing on an outcropping. Freeman cut down three of them. A dozen sparkling green beams demolished the others as the riflemen in the rear opened fire. The Avatari shot back at us, and I lost two more of my men.
The riflemen were falling back as the grenadiers forced their way ahead. “Stay together! Stay together!” I yelled.
Burton repeated the order.
Thomer fell back to help Freeman.
We found a twenty-foot rise that seemed to run the length of the cavern and climbed it. Along the crest of that rise I could see the light from the spheres as it traveled along its spine. We had to stick to the rise—the ground around us was buried under a layer of drones working so close together that their legs touched. The rise, though, left us as exposed as a can on a post in a shooting gallery.
“They’re all around us!” one of my men screamed. That was our only warning that we had waded into the horde. The next moment guardian spiders started climbing up the sides of our path.
“They’re coming in close,” Herrington called over the interLink.
I barely had time to issue the order to switch to pistols before the guardian spiders began climbing the rise. Private Grossman, one of the men carrying the nukes, stood in the two o’ clock position in our formation. When a guardian charged the circle from eleven o’clock, he and the three other men carrying the nuke shot it. He was still looking at the guardian they killed when another spider lashed out at him from the top of a twenty-foot shelf. His armor split, and he screamed in pain. The guardian slashed at him again and would have stabbed him clean through, but Herrington shot it.
Blind and scared, Grossman threw off his helmet. He inhaled a lungful of the poisoned air and dropped to one knee.
“Simmons …” I said. The man instinctively knew what I meant. He aimed his pistol at Grossman. “Sorry, pal,” he whispered as he fired a single shot, which caused Grossman’s head to explode. I did not know if being hit in the head by a particle beam was painless, but I was certain it beat the hell out of running around blind as the acid in the air melted you inside and out.
With only a hundred yards to go, the light from the spheres was so bright that my visor automatically switched to tactical view. Now I could see colors. I could see the black-gray spiders against the flat black rock.
A white bolt struck Thompson, the Marine walking next to me. He spun around and fell to the ground, lying there convulsing for a moment, then slumping into death. Another bolt struck Robison, one of the men lugging a nuke. It hit him in the head, and he fell dead and rolled down the hill. The other men handling that nuke lost their balance and slid after him, dragging the nuke in their wake.
“Cover me,” Thomer shouted. He dropped on his ass and slid down the side of the rise. At least a half dozen of those spider-thing drones scurried along his path. I shot three; Burton might have hit five. We might have been down to two dozen men now. A bolt hit a man to my left a moment later, and we were down one more.
I spotted the Avatari trooper coming toward us, and fired.
“Boll, Herrington—cover our ass side,” I shouted. “Use grenades, and don’t worry about the trip home.” The trip home was the last of our concerns. Herrington managed to pick off two Avatari a moment later. Boll took a bolt in the head and rolled into a hole with a drone. The giant spider-thing did not see him when it stabbed its leg through Boll’s stomach and scratched at the ground flinging his corpse around like a rag. As it continued to dig, the spider-thing tore Corporal Boll in half.
“Get up here!” I yelled at Thomer, as he struggled to climb the side of the rise carrying the hundred-pound nuke. Bolts flew around us. Another grenadier fell.
I shouted for Freeman.
Ray came toward me, still carrying Sweetwater in the crook of his right arm. He dropped to one knee and reached for Thomer with his left. Instead of grabbing the big man’s arm, Thomer handed him the nuke. He did not attempt to climb the hill. Instead, he turned, pulled out his pistol, and began shooting spider-things.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Get going,” Thomer said. “I’ll catch you on the way out.”
“Sure,” I said. “Catch you on the way out.”
