Three riflemen came forward and took the nuke. I was about to ask for a fourth man and realized these were the only ones I had left. We were down to twelve men—three men lugging one nuke and four lugging the other, Herrington watching the rear, Burton, Freeman, Sweetwater, and me.
We ran ahead as quickly as we could, stumbling along the top of the rise until we reached the spheres. A guardian sprang up to block our way, and I shot it. I shot it again and again because even though it was dead, it still blocked our path. The three men carrying the first of the nukes managed to snake their way around it, but the four-man team carrying the second bomb lost their footing and rolled down the side of the rise. They vanished into the darkness.
I could not go back to help them. Stray bolts flew through the air around us, and we had to move on. I did not see where they fell, and could not find so much as their virtual dog tags. Things were unraveling so quickly. By the time we reached the spheres, Burton was gone. Where we lost him, I had no idea.
Of the forty-nine of us that had left Valhalla that morning, only seven of us remained to place the bomb.
CHAPTER FIFTY
The line of spheres stretched out in both directions, an endless string of glowing balls simultaneously emitting crystalline white light and oozing brown sludge. The light from the spheres shone over the swampy puddle of the gas like overbright moonlight. The cave that had once covered the spheres had vanished, and only its footprint remained—a half-pipe trench partially filled by a layer of gas.
Still silent, Freeman carried Sweetwater to the outside edge of that trench and lowered him to the ground.
“Is he even alive?” Herrington asked me.
We got our answer when the scientist sank to his knees but remained vertical. Looking at the clock in my visor, I saw that only twenty minutes had passed since we had entered the Avatari dig. It didn’t seem possible. It felt like the entire universe had changed in those twenty short minutes.
What was left of my company fanned out to form a perimeter while Freeman helped Sweetwater open his canvas bag and fish out equipment. I took my place along the perimeter, my back to the light, looking out into a darkness in which monsters lurked and stealing an occasional glance at Freeman and Sweetwater. One time I looked over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of Freeman dragging the scientist toward the spot where the gas came to the edge of the rocks. When I looked back again, I saw Freeman pulling some kind of cylinder out of Sweetwater’s canvas bag. There were more cylinders on the ground, a whole pile of them. Freeman showed the cylinder he was holding to Sweetwater and the scientist shook his head.
Out in the distance, white bolts and green flashes were visible. One of my men was still alive out there, probably Thomer. A spider moved in the nearby shadows. Herrington raised a rocket to fire at it, but I hit it first with my particle-beam cannon.
“Nice shooting, sir,” Herrington said.
Behind me, Freeman lay flat on his stomach and held one of the cylinders as far over the gas as he could. He brought the cylinder back and showed it to Sweetwater.
A bolt struck Private Ferris in the chest, and he crumpled. Herrington and I both returned fire, but the company was now down to six men. As I thought about it, for all intents and purposes, the magic number was five. Sweetwater could not possibly live much longer.
“Harrrisss.” The voice whispering over the interLink sounded more like wind than someone speaking. “Harrrrisss.” I would have dismissed the message as my imagination, but the name “Freeman” appeared on my visor.
I turned and saw both Freeman and Sweetwater staring in my direction. They had removed the nuclear device from its outer shell, and Sweetwater was sitting on the ground beside the disassembled bomb while Freeman knelt over him.
“Shoot anything that moves,” I told Herrington and Grubb, the last of my grenadiers. I went and knelt beside Sweetwater.
Stripped from its shell, the bomb looked like a rock tumbler—a spherical canister with chrome piping and lots of wires. It had a little keypad, which Freeman must have used to program the explosion. Sweetwater could not have set the bomb; his fingers had swollen to the point of bursting.
The red LED above the keypad said
The goggles had done a fair job of protecting Sweetwater’s eyes. The lids of his eyes were heavily swollen, and the whites of his eyes had mostly turned the color of blood, but he could see. Through the fog in his oxygen mask, I saw that blisters had formed on Sweetwater’s lips around his mouth.
The scientist beckoned with both hands for me to come closer, so I bent down even lower until my helmet was practically against his face.
“What do you think, Harris? Would we have made a good Marine?” he asked.
“I still like you better as a scientist,” I said. He chuckled, a painfully dry sound rising up from his throat.
“You’d make a shitty scientist, Lieutenant. You kill everything you see,” Sweetwater croaked. Then he motioned me even closer. “The case …the case around the device. We’ve set the device to explode in twenty minutes. Put the bomb in the gas.”
“The gas won’t destroy the bomb?” I asked.
Sweetwater shook his head. “Not fast.”
Even if the Avatari knew what we had and went looking for it, I doubted they would find the nuke in the gas. “You know, Sweetwater,” I said. “I was wrong, you’d make a hell of a Marine.”
Sweetwater coughed up something that looked like blood. “Run fast. Maybe you can make it out.”
I wanted to tell him that we’d take him out with us, but I knew better, and so did he.
“The clock starts when you close the case. You better run fast,” he said.
I toyed with the idea of simply setting the bomb off, then I looked at that clock again. If we made a mad dash and the aliens did not pin us in their cross fire, we could probably reach the transport in ten minutes, maybe less. A mile to the slope, a short uphill sprint, then out to the transport.
“The nuke’s on a twenty-minute timer,” I said on an open frequency. “What do you think? Do we stay here, or make a break for it?”
“Think we can make it out?” Grubb asked.
“Maybe we should guard the bomb till it explodes. This whole thing is for nothing if the aliens disarm it,” said Herrington.
“They won’t,” I said, “I’m throwing it into the gas.”
“Well, in that case, I wouldn’t mind collecting my back pay,” Herrington said.
“Yeah, me too,” I said.
I started to slide the inner mechanism of the nuke back in the sleeve, then stopped. Once I closed it, there would be no time to do anything but chuck the nuke in the gas and run, and there was something I needed to do.
A guardian spider dropped off a wall and landed on Private Neery. Herrington and Grubb shot the creature, but Neery was already dead.
Sweetwater lay on his stomach looking away from me toward the spheres. Sure that he could not see me, I slowly pulled out my pistol. The man had suffered too much. I wanted to end his suffering and seal the bomb, but I hesitated before pulling the trigger, and he turned and saw me.
He reached for me with the wad of raw meat that had once been his hand.
“Our gun,” was all he said.
“You’re an amazing man, Dr. Sweetwater,” I said as I aimed my pistol at his head. I had not yet laid my finger across the trigger. I hated what I was about to do.
Freeman pushed my gun away. He dug through the scientist’s canvas bag and pulled out Sweetwater’s small- caliber pistol. Freeman placed the gun in Sweetwater’s hand, then gently closed the little scientist’s fingers around the toy. Through the clear plastic of his oxygen mask, a faint smile formed across Sweetwater’s bloodstained mouth.
