We lit it up, of course, with a hundred burning beams of light. Our lasers lanced the beast, hissed into thick skin, blackened it, and then bored deep into the monster’s flesh. Men held down their triggers, screaming in rage or fear or both. Beams shot through the great tube of squirming meat and burst out the far side seconds later.
It did not die easily, however. The twin great cannons on either side of it chugged, reloading themselves. I fired at the mechanism, hoping to disable it before it could get off another shot. The Worm turned in my direction. Could it have realized my plan to destroy its armament? I’ll never know. It lunged forward with one heaving motion, struggling to function now, due to the vast number of wounds in its body. The great head dipped down, and to my horror Lieutenant Chen was swallowed almost in her entirety. The strange, horizontally opposed jaws opened and shut, chopping her off at the feet. Two boots and gray-white shinbones were left, sheared off and still standing on the tunnel floor.
We kept beaming, and it sagged down, convulsing and thrashing. Men were tossed about in wild confusion, dodging the monster and beaming it until it was only a quivering, steaming mass of meat.
Long before it stopped shivering, however, a new wave of Worms arrived. Nowhere near as big as the monster we’d just finished, but large enough to ride bareback, this wave seemed endless. They were unarmed, fortunately. They had only their snapping jaws and mandibles.
We backed up into a circle and burned them as they came by the hundreds.
“Drill-tanks in the side tunnels, break through!” I shouted, and heard the big boring lasers fire up.
The Worms kept coming, ignoring the sounds in the newly bored tunnels on either side. I was very glad I could not smell the burning gore or feel it, slick and greasy on my hands.
The two drill-tanks ended the rush of Worms. We slaughtered them. Hundreds, perhaps thousands died. I had to give them their due, they didn’t mind dying for their home. Not for the first time, as I stood slipping on the wet floors, I doubted the ethics of our mission. Was Earth so worthwhile that we should wantonly destroy other species on other worlds to ensure our survival? How many other worlds would my boots tread upon, how many mass-murders would I be responsible for, following the heartless orders of the Macros?
I pushed these debilitating thoughts aside and tried to focus on the goal. If we could get to the heart of the place, hopefully killing as few Worms as possible, we could be done with this mission and out of here. I suspected the strategic value of the mountain’s heart was industrial. Perhaps it was the last factory they had that could produce nuclear mines. Maybe, if we took it out, the Macros would leave the rest of the Worm population alone as they could no long obstruct the rings and disrupt Macro fleets. I told myself that whatever it was, all of this would soon be over with. I don’t like to lie to myself, but sometimes, it’s necessary.
The tunnel we’d bored through first was so choked with Worm bodies, I ordered the drill-tanks in the side tunnels to make new passages. When they broke through, a rush of men followed them. We entered a vast underground chamber. It had artifacts, here and there, the first Worm artifacts I’d seen.
“What the heck is this?” asked Kwon, stumping up to me with an oddly-shaped lump of resin in his hands. The thing looked like a melted tree-branch, or a bone made of candlewax.
I took the object and examined it closely. I had no concept of its significance. It did not look like a natural formation, however. Someone had created this on purpose. My men were wandering the chamber, using their suit-lights to examine the walls. They pointed and poked at the artifacts they found. There were ovals on the walls, with dark reliefs formed inside the ovals. These reliefs were delicate, and when my men reached out and poked at them, they broke and crumbled.
“I bet they make these,” said Kwon, “with spit or something.”
I looked at him sharply, then looked back at the walls and the ceiling. I ran my suit lights over a dozen ovals and sculpted shapes that stood apart here and there, rising up from the floor like stalagmites.
“Hands off, everyone!” I ordered. Men moved quickly. They backed away from the walls and pulled out their weapons. Beamers glowed, their targeting dots shining red on a hundred spots.
“No,” I said, “they aren’t dangerous. These are-pieces of art. This is some kind of gallery, or museum. Don’t damage anything further. No souvenirs.”
A few men dropped twisting sculptures of brown resin. Kwon came up to me and leaned close.
“This don’t look like art to me, sir,” he said, using his usual, overly-loud whisper. He reached out to touch a flaky sculpture with his thick fingers. Pieces of it crumbled as he poked at it.
“I know. But a lot of what I find in museums doesn’t look like art to me, either. To a Worm mind, maybe this is priceless. Maybe that big Worm was the librarian, and the others were on a field trip from school.”
Kwon gave a halting, honking laugh. I didn’t bother to argue my point further with him. Few of my men seemed to be troubled by the fact we were invading the city of another biotic species and wrecking the place. The Worms were just too different, I supposed. For most people, they engendered no sympathy.
“Enough dawdling. Let’s move out. Wounded get to ride in the drill-tanks. No faking. Kwon, get my team moving. Put anyone who breaks more stuff in here on point.”
My last order got a response from the men. No one wanted to be on point. Kwon, shouting and slamming his great hands together to make booming noises, got everyone moving again. We found a tunnel out of this place and set a drill-tank to digging right through the wall of it. I aimed it as straight as I could. No more fooling around, we were going to bore our way to the central chamber-whatever it was-and get this mission finished. A few of the frescoes and reliefs broke as the drill-tank fired up. I gritted my teeth and felt slightly sick about it. What would a pack of humans at the Smithsonian look like to an army of Worms? Would they be capable of respect and mercy? I couldn’t be sure, but I figured any beings that valued art must have some kind of higher aspirations.
— 52-
Once we broke through the relatively thin walls of the art chamber and plowed deeply into the dirt beyond, the drill-tanks began to speed up. I was surprised to see they were soon moving at a slow walking-pace. At this speed, we could reach our goal in few hours.
I had a new sensor officer assigned by now-a non-com corporal named Jensen. “Jensen, get over here,” I shouted.
“Sir!” he yelled and trotted up, dragging the unfortunate Lieutenant Chen’s array behind him. It was gouged and heavily-stained, but was still operable. Jensen bounced the unit over every hard rib of dirt on the tunnel floor.
“Take it easy with that thing. Treat it like a rifle.”
“Sorry, sir,” he said, standing nervously beside me.
I watched him fidget for a second or two. I wondered if he thought I’d somehow given Chen an assignment which had led to her gruesome death. He could be right. Maybe these Worms, especially the big ones, didn’t like our actively pinging sensor arrays. Maybe it made big Worms grumpy to get hit with sonar echoes. Well, that was just too bad.
“Don’t piss yourself, marine,” I said. “You’ve got a sweet gig here. All you have to do is switch that thing on and feed me the density readings while we follow this tank to Hell. You are my sensor-operator until you’re dead, or I find someone better.”
“Thank you, uh, sir…” Jensen said. With diffident fingers, he worked the sensor array’s interface. He set it for a thirty yard range-unreasonably short for most purposes, but enough to answer my question.
I snorted as I watched him dial down the range even further. I knew why he did it. He suspected that the active pinging of the sensor unit was what had drawn that big Worm and caused it to eat Chen. Maybe he didn’t relish the idea of ending up inside the next big one’s belly.
“Well?” I asked.
“This is very soft stuff, sir,” he said. “It’s softer than normal dirt back home. It’s not even dirt, really. It’s more like-sawdust. Full of cellulose and resins. It is structurally sound, however. It doesn’t seem to crush down easily, or we would sink in it. Another point is the heat we are using to make our own tunnels, we are melting the material and making it stiffer.”
“All right,” I said, considering his information. “You’re going to walk right behind the lead drill-tank from now on. Keep that thing dialed up another notch or two for range. I want to know if there are any cavities around us,
