The Siege of Earth (The Ember War Saga Book 7) (16 page)

“For a species that moves planets from solar system to solar system, it should be easy to put their workers in an environment suit.” Hale tapped a finger against the side of his pistol. He turned around and aimed it at a globe behind the Marines and fired.

The globe shattered, the fragments disintegrating before they hit the ground.

Marines swung around, weapons up and ready for battle.

“As you were,” Cortaro said. “Keep moving.”

The globes on either side of the new gap in the line burned brighter. Hale picked up a rock and tossed it.

The rock arced away, then floated slowly at an angle when it crossed through the gap. The stone neared another globe and fell to the ground.

“The globes generate the gravity,” Hale said. “Bet there’s a force field that keeps the air in as well.”

“Great, sir, we know something new,” Cortaro said. “We aren’t entirely sure if this tunnel will get us to the drill, or back to the surface, but we’ve figured this puzzle out.”

“This might prove useful,” Hale said.

“Sir, got an opening coming up on the right,”
Jacobs said through the IR.

“Check it out.” Hale glanced at his gauntlet screen. “Should be the side tunnel we need to get to the drill.”

“Moving.”

“You doing all right, sir?” Cortaro asked. “I see your face twitching. If it hurts that bad, then Yarrow can give you something.”

“And then I won’t be thinking straight,” Hale said.

“Have you been thinking about how we’re going to get the hell out of here? If the
Breit
didn’t make it…”

“If she’s gone, then Earth will send another fleet through the Crucible. We’ll hitch a ride back with them. We, high command, can’t let the Grinder come online,” Hale said.

“Sir! There’s—”
Jacob’s warning cut off into static.

Hale ran for the entrance, but Cortaro stopped him with a hand to his chest.

“No weapons fire,” Cortaro said. “No noise. Could be interference that cut her off.”

“Could be the enemy.” Hale ran forward, his pistol held ready next to his helmet. He made his way into a small cavern where he found Crimson squad standing in the middle of the room, dead wraiths all around them. The trail of dead led to a doorway piled high with bodies.

“What is—” An arm wrapped around Hale’s neck and jerked him backwards. The razor-sharp edge of a silver blade pressed against his visor just beneath his eye.

“You have blundered into an ambush. Disappointing,” a low voice growled.

Hale pushed the arm away and spun around.

“Steuben!” Hale lowered his pistol. “What happened here? Where have you been?”

“Landing was a bit rough,” Lieutenant Mathias said from a terrace above Hale’s head. Four more Marines stood around him. The lieutenant held up a thin chain with several dog tags on it. “Took casualties before we ever got into the tunnels. Lost Bronx and half my team to those banshee-things a few rooms back. Bunch more just charged in here after that explosion. I assume that was you, sir?”

Hale brought the lieutenant and Steuben up to speed on what he and the other Marines had been through. The rest of Hale’s squad joined them in the cavern.

“Sounds like you’ve been through worse,” Hale said.

“You are hurt. Again,” Steuben said.

“Flesh wound.” Hale waved Cortaro, Jacobs and Mathias over to him. “Take a knee, everyone.”

Hale holstered his pistol and drew a circle in the sand. “OK, the drill is…” He stopped, feeling the thrum of distant machinery through the ground. “Close. Here’s the plan. Pipe up if you have a better idea.”

****

Standish stepped over a wraith corpse and inched closer to the end of the tunnel. The thrum of the drill jarred pebbles and dust loose with each pulse.

“You think this is going to work?” Weiss, a few feet behind, asked over the closed IR.

“I’ve fought giant Xaros constructs with Hale before,” Standish said, swallowing hard. “On Earth, we had the Iron Hearts to pull our asses out of the fire. Takeni: Iron Hearts and orbital fire support. Classified space vault I’m not telling you about: Iron Hearts and a space god…thing. This time, we have a couple more Marines,” he glanced down at his plasma rifle, “and peashooters. Fuck.”

“So…no?”

“We’ll be
fine,
” Standish said. “Probably. Probably fine. The captain and the lieutenants had a good idea pow-wow.” The Marine detached the optics from the top of his rifle and reached them just around the corner.

Video feed of the road running perpendicular to the tunnel and the river of spoil flashed across Standish’s visor and went to every Marine behind him. A little more than a dozen wraiths pulled quadrium from the flowing rocks while many more worked on the opposite side of the river.

“Got some hostiles,” Standish said, “less than before. Nice when a plan comes together. No sign of a sled. Wait…there’s one.” Standish zoomed in on an empty hover sled driven by a single wraith slowing on the opposite side of the gigantic mineshaft. “Wrong side, though. Go or hold, sir?”

“Hold,”
Hale said.
“Give it a few minutes. See if another comes our way.”

“Roger.” Standish swept the optic back and forth over the target area.

“So, you were really on Takeni?” Weiss asked. “You ran through that burning forest?”

“Yes. That sucked, by the way.”

“You were the one that pulled Torni out of that river when she jumped in to save that little Dotty girl?”

“What? No, never happened. You can ask Torni about that yourself,” Standish said.

“Sergeant Torni’s dead. How am I going to do that?” Weiss asked.

Standish tapped the side of his helmet. “Damn IR’s funny in these tunnels.” The optic froze. “Here we go. Captain Hale, got one empty sled arriving.”

“Collapse the stack, ready on my mark,”
Hale said.

Standish crouched slightly and Weiss stepped closer and stuck his rifle over Standish’s shoulder.

“Hey, Weiss.” Standish craned his head up to look at the other Marine, his face pale and moist with sweat.
“Gott mit uns.”

“Gott mit uns.”
Weiss nodded emphatically.

“Attack!” Hale shouted.

Standish rushed forward in a crouch. He cleared the exit and twisted to the left.

The sled idled a few feet over the road. A neat line of wraiths holding omnium cubes waited to hand over their cargo to a lone wraith standing on the flat bed.

“Don’t shoot the sled!” Standish drilled a plasma bolt into the forehead of a wraith holding a cube. He sidestepped and leaped onto the bed where the lone wraith on the sled with him hurled an omnium cube right at Standish’s face.

Standish ducked and rolled forward. Following his momentum, he got to his feet, swung his rifle over his shoulder and drove the butt of the weapon toward the Wraith’s face.

The wraith caught the rifle butt with one hand, freezing Standish’s strike in place. The wraith’s dead eyes clicked from the rifle to Standish.

“Well, shit.” Standish let go of his weapon and ducked forward, ramming an elbow into the wraith’s stomach. There was a grunt and the wraith’s hips shot backwards. Standish swung an uppercut into its chin. Blood and teeth sprayed out of the wraith’s ruined mouth. Standish grabbed it by the shoulders and hip-tossed it through the air and into the spoil stream.

Boulders smashed into the wraith, crushing it into armor fragments and bloody paste as the stream carried the body to the distant exit.

A ruby beam snapped passed his elbow. Standish fell flat and rolled over the side of the sled. He fell next to Hale, who had his plasma rifle over the driver’s controls, firing on wraiths on the other side of the stream. A dying drone disintegrated at the end of the road. Dead wraiths who’d been shot down before they could be directed away from their mining tasks lay like discarded puppets in the dirt.

The Marines fired on the wraiths on the other side of the river, but few of their plasma bolts and few attacks from the wraiths made it across the spoil.

“Get this thing moving, Standish!” Hale ordered.

“Right, let me just—” He stood up and barely missed another beam of energy sent over the top of his head. “Jiminy Christmas! I don’t think they want us to leave, sir.”

“Bailey! Take your shot,” Hale said.

The sniper raised her rail rifle and fired. The supersonic round sent a clap of thunder against Standish’s helmet, hard enough that his ears popped. The bullet hit the opposite side of the tunnel, just below the road’s edge. Dirt, rock and wraiths went flying, all sucked into the spoil and crushed into tiny bits.

Standish jumped back onto the sled and found the controls: several round dials with lit rings. The last sled they found was push operated, but this…

“Ugh, Egan?” Standish asked for the team’s pilot.

“Busy! Very busy!”
The snap of plasma bolts and clipped commands from Cortaro stepped on Egan’s reply.

Standish looked over his shoulder and saw a drone rise up from the edge of the road, stalks lit and ready to attack. Orozco’s heavy cannon beat it into the spoil. The rush of material propelled the drone forward. A stalk shot out and nearly took Standish’s head off before boulders clapped against the drone and spat the crystalline pyrite inside the shell out into the stream.

“OK.” Standish looked at the controls. “I’ve hotwired everything from a 1997 Pontiac to the new hotness Teslas. I can figure this out.” He touched a fingertip to one of the dials and ran it clockwise around the lit ring.

The sled lurched to the side, straight toward the spoil. Small rocks pelted the side of Standish’s helmet as he spun his finger the other way. The craft banked the opposite direction, heading straight for Hale.

Hale dove to the ground as the sled almost scalped him. The sled smashed into the tunnel wall hard enough to pitch Standish off his feet and into the rock.

“Standish!” Hale shouted.

“Yes! Sorry, sir. She’s a bit sensitive.” Standish gingerly touched another dial, and the entire sled fell to the ground. He moved his fingertip the opposite direction and it rose higher. “Think I’ve got it now.” He touched another ring and the sled lurched forward.

“Yup! All aboard the Standish Express!”

Hale waved an arm over his head. “Shift fire!”

Half the Marines swung their rifles at the drill and aimed for the outermost ring. Their plasma bolts smeared across the metal with no effect.

“Bailey, plan B!” Hale called out.

Bailey dropped a spent battery from her belt and attached the power cable running from her rifle to a new battery. She took a tungsten dart from an ammo pouch and slipped it into the acceleration cradle at the base of the rail gun vanes. She aimed at the drill, then raised the weapon to the rocky ceiling just above the spoil stream.

Marines covered their audio receptors and ducked away.

Bailey shot the roof, knocking loose fragments of Pluto’s crust the size of houses. The giant rocks floated in the spoil stream, then moved slowly downstream.

“Load up!” Hale shouted.

The Marines broke away from the firefight with the wraiths on the other side of the spoil, the firing lines for both sides blocked by the new debris. He loaded up the sled, rifles oriented to the front and to the spoil.

Hale was the last one on, needing help from Steuben to climb aboard.

“Go, take us slow,” Hale said.

Standish touched a dial and the sled jerked forward. Bailey slung her plasma carbine off her back and laid flat on the bed. Each time the moving sled passed beneath a floating orb, she destroyed it with a well-timed shot.

Wraiths ran up the opposite road, shooting red beams of death after the Marines.

“Not that slow,” Hale said.

Standish increased the speed, and Bailey missed a shot.

“Hey! This is hard enough without you driving like a sloppy drunk!” she protested.

“I’m getting mixed messages here,” Standish said.

Cortaro stood up and hit the globe Bailey missed. With each globe they destroyed, the spoil stream shifted to the opposite side, toward the functioning globes still generating a gravity field. The once-smooth highway of the spoil stream degraded into a traffic jam of boulders and rocks compacting against each other.

The spoil stream ground to a halt and spilled over the opposite side, crushing the wraiths to bits. The entire cavern filled with rock as the drill kept eating away and filling the space with more rubble. A wall of spoil advanced a few more yards, then stopped.

Standish risked a couple quick glances over his shoulder.

“Well, I’ll be damned. That was a great idea, sir!” Standish said. “You got the drill to bury itself.”

“Think it’ll stop?” Hale asked Cortaro. “Or will it cut through the entire planet and spawn more drones?”

“I don’t think the Xaros can handle the pressure at the core of a planet, sir,” Cortaro said.