Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (43 page)

As the heavy gunners emplaced their weapons, the Charlie squad opened up as targets appeared at the top of the ramp. Several footballs rolled wobbling down, and Repeth joined the others in shifting to blast them to bits with aimed fire from multiple weapons. This caused the acid inside to leak, but without the explosive spreader charge, all it did was smoke and fizzle in place.

“Good thing they don’t have acid hoses,” Dasko said.

“Bite your tongue, Sergeant,” Repeth said. “Damn, I’m getting low on ammo. Air, too.” Her O2 gauge read thirty-five minutes. They’d been fighting for just over an hour. The suits were supposed to be good for at least two, but exertion had cut that. Afterward they had ten minutes of oxygen in their internal cybernetics, stretchable to a lot longer if they went into hibernation.

“Why don’t we just pull back now, if we’re going to lose the base?” Dasko asked.

“When did you start thinking, you dumb grunt?” Repeth replied with cheerful sarcasm. “We hold because we are ordered to hold. Maybe we’re buying time to get more wounded out, or the squids that are in their weapons control rooms. I don’t know.”

“But –”

“Dasko, dammit, just shut up and soldier.” To a Marine, that was an effective insult. The man shut up.

Another cluster of acid footballs rolled down the ramp, this time followed by a rush of bugs. “Get the eggs,” Repeth ordered her remaining line Marines. The heavy gunners ripped into the insectoids with railgun rounds and a missile.

One egg made it through, to splatter the barrier and parts of the Charlie squad with goo. Several fell back writhing while others held the line. “Dasko, fill in,” Repeth ordered, and the sergeant and his remaining five Marines surged up to the barrier.

Blue bolts crashed into the barricade and two more Marines went down, and a bug reached far enough to smash his sword through the helmet of another, before suddenly the attack ran out of steam.

As the last enemy died twitching on the floor, Repeth began slapping Marines on their helmets rather than trying to sort out Charlie and Bravo comm channels. “Fall back,” she broadcast on maximum external speaker, hoping the tiny bit of atmosphere left would carry the sound. Her own Marines heard her just fine on the company channel, and quickly pulled up the heavy weapons to fall back again.

The Charlie Marines who were left saw what was happening and apparently decided they had better follow suit, so they grabbed their wounded and beat feet as Repeth’s people did the same.

As they passed Dasko’s original position, a head popped out of the weapons emplacement access corridor. Repeth almost shot it in reflex before she stopped herself. As the rest bounded past, she saw the ground force warrant and sergeant had left their railgun control center in their flimsy emergency suits. Without any idea of what comm channel they were on, she just blasted them with her external speaker and waved. “Follow us to the shaft!”

They did, but she had to grab them and propel them along, as their suits did not have stabilization jets and they didn’t have the enormous strength and speed of the Marines’ cybernetic augmentation. Repeth almost dropped the bug sword she still held, but at the last moment she tucked it under an arm and held onto it. It had proven useful so far, and at least would make a nice war trophy.

The tunnel shook and parts of the ceiling broke loose as they ran under it. “What the hell?” she mumbled.

“Looks like the bugs are getting impatient,” Miller’s voice came over her comm. “Before we lost all of them the sensors showed they brought in some kind of digging apparatus.”

“Seems a weird way to do business,” Repeth said as she finally reached the entrance to the deep shaft. “I’d have thought they would have brought in the digger first and made some holes, then rushed us through all the breaches. Instead, with clear numerical superiority, they charged us like…”

“Like bugs. Don’t try to figure it out. Just be happy. Alien minds are alien.”

“I’m not
happy
, ma’am,” she replied as she shoved the two grounders through the massive hatch and watched them descend the sloping tunnel. At that moment it appeared as if Miller and she were the only two remaining outside. “We lost a lot of good people. Sergeant Dasko asked me, ‘for what’? And I really didn’t have an answer to give him.”

In response, Miller pushed a display to her HUD. “For this, First Sergeant.”

Jerky video from a helmet-cam showed the inside of an Aardvark maintenance hangar, a long Pilum missile resting on a loader. One suited figure had the warhead hatch open while the owner of the camera assisted. No audio came through.

“Two of the ordnance techs are trying to rig a fusion warhead to detonate,” Miller explained. “We’ve been trying to buy them time.”

“Holy shit. But why didn’t anyone have this set up already?”

“I guess no one thought it was a good idea to have live fusion warheads inside the base, what with the problems we had with the criminal element.”

“Yeah, I know something about that. So where did they get that one?”

“These guys hopped it back from one of the ordnance loading stations into the maintenance hangar.”

Repeth’s eyes narrowed. “How are they going to get to a bunker?”

“They might not.”

“Shit.”

“Agreed.”

“Do we have any idea why the Meme are trying to take the base instead of just smashing it? I mean, the whole attack will be over within, what, a day maybe?”

Miller nodded. “Colonel Ruchek thinks they are so confident they are trying to preserve assets, but I have another theory.”

“I’m all ears.”

“What if they wipe out all human life on Earth? What’s left?”

Repeth’s blood ran cold. “Just what’s on bases here and there…like, thirty thousand civilians here in the bunkers.”

“And the Meme want slaves, and bodies to take. It’s what they live for.”

“Oh, crap. You see this?” Repeth’s video feed from the one bomb tech, looking over the other one’s suited shoulder, showed monsters charging up behind. Like an old horror movie, she wanted to scream at the victim, but exactly the same way, there was nothing she could do. Alien swords swung and cut one tech down, then the camera jerked and rolled over to show a piece of the floor and scurrying legs.

“Any chance they set the bomb?”

Repeth shook her head. “I don’t think so. They were concentrating on it to the end.”

“Shit. It was a good try.” Miller saluted in the general direction of the fallen techs. “I’m making sure that video gets retransmitted and saved. They deserve medals.”

“And more.” Repeth turned to Miller. “After you, ma’am.”

“Right.” Captain Miller strode through the opened tunnel door, watching as Repeth slammed it shut and then spun the dogging wheel.

Once the meter-thick door was tight, they bounded as fast as they could down the wide ramp, heading deep into the moon’s crust. When they reached the first dogleg, Miller yelled into the open channel, “Initiate collapse protocol!”

Behind her, charges in the ceiling exploded one by one in a carefully-timed sequence to collapse the entrance shaft. The two Marines sped up, using their stabilization jets in zero-gravity mode to fly faster and faster down the tunnel as the blasts came closer and closer. Repeth told herself they should have no problems, as the explosives only reached to the dogleg. In fact, the whole point of the sharp corner was to limit any overspill from rockfall.

Her surprise was therefore all the greater when she felt the enormous shock. The last thing she remembered was the tunnel writhing like a snake, and the loudest gong she had ever heard bloodied her eardrums and blinded her eyeballs before she blacked out.

What shall be, shall be.

So Shan put
Artemis
deliberately out of his mind and sat watching on his HUD as the enemy landed on the base and fought their way in.
Species 331,
he thought to himself.
Vicious, able to operate in vacuum, willing to sacrifice themselves for any objectives…the perfect Pureling. Perhaps I should have provided anonymous tips about what the Marines would be facing, but the risk of discovery far outweighed any potential benefit. Physics is physics, and weapons are weapons.

Then he considered attempting to interfere, to assist the defense.
Certainly I could kill many of them. With the number of landing craft, at least four thousand Purelings against at most two thousand Marines. I might be able to destroy several hundred. Would that be enough to tip the scale? But if I do that, I cannot manually detonate this device, and I cannot risk setting a timer on it. What if I were killed and yet we won – and then the bomb went off? Irony indeed.

So instead, Shan waited in the cold vacuum, with just the low lights of the bordello to keep him company. He looked idly around the room, his eyes resting on a magnificent grand piano. Regretfully, he considered, then discarded the notion of playing it for a time. He did enjoy music. He had for his entire life, ever since he had landed on the blue planet and blended with a Chinese farmer. Unfortunately, with no atmosphere, the best he could do would be to sense the vibrations through his fingers.

Then again…what else is there to do?
Perhaps I should clench a conductive rod in my teeth and press it against the piano’s soundboard, as the deaf Ludwig Van Beethoven did.

Shan stripped off his suit, hardening and sealing his skin and eyes as he did so, until the lack of air did not bother him. He shut the doors of this room and with delight found that he could seal them against air loss, apparently a safety feature that the owners had built into it.

Soon, he had allowed the air from his suit’s reservoir to fill the chamber, creating a thin but usable atmosphere. Sitting down at the piano, he first ran his hands over the yellow silk he wore, taking pleasure once again in the material’s marvelous texture.

I have loved many women, and a handful of men, he thought to himself, sampling all the pleasures of the flesh. I have eaten the finest foods, tasted the finest wine, and listened to the finest music. Then, at the last, I experienced the greatest pleasure of all: friendship, and comradeship, loyalty and betrayal. The joy of killing, and of refraining. The honor and privilege of passing on my genes to my wife, who will bear my child, if she survives.

I am ready.

Slowly he caressed the keyboard, and then, though saddened that the thin air did not do justice to the sound, began to work his way through Beethoven’s Ninth, without a doubt one of the greatest pieces of human music ever created. The notes swelled as he lost himself in their embrace.

When he finished the movement, he slipped his helmet on and checked the HUD. No live Marines remained above ground, according to either network. The last two had entered the bunker tunnel less than a minute ago, and according to the data recording, the final two civilians had died in the attack ship maintenance hangar just moments before that.

It is time.

Without further contemplation, knowing delay would help not at all, he folded his hands in his lap and sent the command, and Grissom Base dissolved into fire.

A moment later, Observation trium provided an alternative view, from the closest Sentry drone to the enemy moon. A dirty fission-fusion explosion, primitive but powerful, had scoured the base from its surface, leaving a deep crater. A storm of interacting gases, heat and ice roiled the area before slowly dissipating, leaving nothing of use.

“What happened?” Three asked.

“I suspect they self-destructed,” Two answered.

“Obviously,” chimed in One. “Close Combat should have anticipated such a tactic,” he said with righteous indignation.

“You didn’t,” Three replied, and then suddenly withdrew his eyeball below the rim of his tank.

One controlled his response with difficulty. “I did, actually, but I did not wish to embarrass Close Combat trium by pointing it out.”

Three, whatever he thought about this explanation, apparently decided not to argue, and only slowly extended his optical stalk again, inserting it into his screen socket and avoiding eye contact with his superior.

“It is unimportant in any case,” Two said. “We lost some Purelings, and they have lost a valuable base, which cannot now be used against us. Once we have conquered this system, we can examine it at our leisure.”

“And,” One interjected, “there are plenty of Humans to serve us as Underlings on their home planet. Billions, if the reports are correct. At least a few million will survive our attack.”

Three made a gesture of acknowledgement. “Perhaps…perhaps Close Combat will be censured, even demoted for their lapse.”

“That would be agreeable,” Two said.

“Most agreeable,” said One. “My plans continue to improve our opportunities.”

Two rolled his eyeball in Three’s direction, thinking One would not notice. One noticed, but chose not to say anything.

He would remember that slight, however, as he ascended.

“I thought I said to make sure we were out of range of EMP,” Huen said mildly. He was not the type to raise his voice, which made his admonition all the more embarrassing.

“Sorry, sir,” the helmsman replied. “The explosion was much stronger than predicted for those weapons. Our hardening should have been enough.”

“Maybe the enemy forces contained something that created the spike,” mused the weapons officer. “Extra fissionables, or deuterium-tritium fuel.”