Baffled, Graves toyed with the suit. “What kind of machine does this?”

  “There’s no machine involved, Primus,” I said. “At least, none that we can find.”

  “I think he’s right,” Natasha said. “I would guess the Vulbites sit and spin these suits out, one layer at a time. They secrete a kind of sticky silk that adheres to the stardust. After many coats, the fabric becomes a solid cloth. With curing, it’s an almost impenetrable armor.”

  Graves looked down at the suit, then at all of us. “It’s shit then. This whole mission was a waste. We can’t get the Vulbites to do this for us.”

  “Huh…” I said, looking over a suit and thinking hard. “I’ve got an idea, sir. But you’re not going to like it.”

  He looked at me with squinting eyes. “I already hate it—but I know we’re going to have to try. Just tell me the bad news. No bullshit for once, McGill.”

  “Sir, I never bullshit you. I give you the straight and narrow. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night otherwise.”

  “It’s that bad, huh?”

  I nodded. “Yeah… worse, probably.”

  He sighed, and he looked defeated. Then I started to explain. I sugar-coated it, and I grinned real hard, and I blew sunshine at him like there was no tomorrow—but it didn’t really work. When I was finished, both he and Natasha looked like they wanted to puke.

  -59-

  Less than an hour later, we took every trooper we had and every scrap of equipment we could find through the gateway to Dark World.

  Now, on the very face of it, that seemed downright crazy. I had to give that point to everyone who brought it up. Why leave Glass World entirely? What if more troops came down from Winslade? What if he made a big rescue effort, and they found we were all gone?

  The trouble with that hope was that it wasn’t going to happen. The numbers were all on the table, and the math was clear. Winslade had decided to bury our sorry asses. He’d rid himself of everyone who’d been pissing him off lately. That included me, Graves, Manfred, and all our loyal troops.

  What an easy win it was for him. He could return to Earth and mark us down as permed. Sure, he’d failed the mission, but at least he didn’t have to worry about my big mouth, or Graves with his seniority in the legion.

  I knew what he was bucking for. He wanted Varus. He’d decided to grab control of the outfit months ago, as far as I could tell. He’d gotten Wurtenberger to back him somehow and Galina had never really wanted to run Varus in the first place.

  With Graves and me out of the way, it should be smooth sailing. Becoming the tribune in Varus wasn’t a hard post to get, after all. No one important really wanted the job.

  By the sick look on the faces of those who I talked to about it, I figured they agreed with my theory.

  “Assuming we’re screwed anyways,” I told them as we had a huddle in the Vulbite chamber, “we might as well go for broke.”

  Graves grunted in disgust. “If I could think of another path—of anything remotely plausible—I’d go with it. But I can’t. Therefore, you have the ball, McGill. God help us all.”

  “Amen,” Harris added.

  He and all the other adjuncts were circled around us, part of the huddle. They all looked like someone had flushed their goldfish. If I’d been a sensitive man, I might have felt insulted by their obvious lack of faith. Fortunately, I knew my plan was the only play we had, so I didn’t care what they thought.

  “Adjunct Leeson,” I said, turning to the shorter, stockier man. “This first part is going to rely most heavily on you and your sappers. Natasha has used her lidar kit to locate hollow spaces nearby. Below us and a bit to the north, we’ve located a large open chamber. That’s our goal.”

  “McGill…?” Natasha said nervously. “There’s no guarantee that we’re going to find anything there. This complex is huge. There are chambers—”

  I put my hand up to stop her negative talk. “I know all that, girl. We’re not betting on horses here. We’re making the one move we’ve got left, and yakking isn’t going to get it done.”

  She formed a tight line with her lips and nodded. She moved away and used her equipment to pinpoint the best drilling spot she could find.

  “Remember,” I called after her. “We don’t want to run into any other tunnels. We have to get there clean and by surprise.”

  She didn’t answer, she just went to work. I nodded like she’d given me a thumbs-up and turned back to the rest.

  “Primus, all the rest of the team has to do is keep the Vulbites out of this chamber for as long as possible.”

  “There are more enemy troops pouring into this region every minute,” Leeson said. “We’ve killed a thousand at least. They just pull the bodies out of the tunnels and send in fresh troops and drones. If we kill a hundred to one, we’re still doomed eventually.”

  Graves worked on his tapper, going over action reports. “Our casualty rate is too high,” he said. “We’ve only got an hour, maybe two, before we’re overwhelmed.”

  I grinned and slapped my gauntlets together loudly. “That long? That’s excellent! I never figured I’d be given that kind of time, thanks for the good news, gentlemen.”

  They gave me sour looks, but they didn’t shoot me down. They knew they were witnessing my ham-handed effort to raise morale.

  We split up and went to work after that. The sappers began drilling their way into the floor where Natasha was squatting and scanning. She squawked about not having located the perfect path yet, but I brushed her aside.

  “You’ll see better once we’ve worked our way down a few meters,” I assured her. “Specialists, proceed!”

  The sappers worked their drones like pros. These digging machines weren’t as big and efficient as pigs, but their little self-propelled units could burrow through anything softer than puff-crete. They were supposed to be used to dig under a wall or other obstacle then blow themselves up.

  Instead of planting explosives, the sappers used the drones to worm their way into the packed earth and loosen it up. A team of men with powered armor and folding shovels then began scooping the old-fashioned way in their wake. Soon, the place smelled of oil and ozone. The whining sounds of drones filled the cavern.

  The work proceeded at a steady rate, and I began to believe we might just pull this off—or at least that we had a chance. About twenty minutes later, however, the Vulbites reminded us that they had brains of their own.

  “The roof!” Sargon called out loudly. “They’re breaking through!”

  The Vulbites, unsurprisingly, were faster diggers than human sappers. They’d chosen a similar strategy, and they ripped open the top of the chamber overhead.

  The space up there was hung with half-cured armor suits, which fell with a splattering of dirt once the breach opened wide.

  A Vulbite trooper, losing his grip, dropped into the chamber with us. Then more fell behind him. The whole mess landed right on top of the gateway posts.

  What followed was an eye-opener. All the times I’d ever walked through those posts, I’d always approached by stepping from one side or the other, walking forward through the field at a steady rate.

  The falling Vulbites had unwittingly taken a different approach. One of them fell right on top of the field, from a vertical angle, rather than walking through it.

  The long and the short of it was the field cut the Vulbite in half. The buzzing nimbus sent a center slice of him—his guts, I supposed—to the far end of the connection. A wet splatter must have arrived and oozed all over the floor back on Glass World.

  At our end, two wriggling halves of the hapless Vulbite, each about a meter long, flopped and twisted on either side of the posts.

  If the enemy had been human, they probably would have balked at that point—but these guys were bugs. The rest dove in, some dying horribly on the gateway, others crushed by their falling comrades. It rained Vulbites, and many of them were hurt or killed immediately—but they kept on coming.

  By this time, half the human troops in the room were aiming upward. We released a firestorm of bolts at the ceiling. The glassy roof smoked and bubbled.

  Vulbites fell even faster. Some of them got off shots of their own, striking down a few of my soldiers, but that was rare. For the most part, it was a slaughter.

  Still, the rush continued.

  “Jumping Jesus!” Adjunct Leeson called out. “If they keep coming, they’ll suffocate us with sheer bodies!”

  In the end, his prediction didn’t come true. Instead, something much worse happened.

  One or more of the Vulbites fell out of the roof and dropped right on top of the upstanding gateway posts. As the aliens each weighed a hundred kilos or more, the post was knocked down, trampled, and crushed. One of the posts, I saw, had broken in two.

  The glimmering light of the field that was our only connection to the rest of Legion Varus flickered, buzzed, and went out.

  We were cut off now, I knew. Cut off and sealed in this underground hellhole—probably forever.

  The chatter of gunfire continued, and a few more men lost their lives struggling with the attackers that were falling out of the ceiling. After about a hundred Vulbites had died, however, the attackers stopped coming. Maybe they’d decided it wasn’t working—but in my opinion, they’d already done their worst.

  Grabbing up a big wad of Leeson’s tunic, I pulled him close. “Adjunct!” I roared in his face, using that deeper, threatening voice a man my size can reach at times. “Send all your drones down that chute! Blow that tunnel open, blow it deep! Now!”

  Leeson looked both sorrowful and scared. “I’m sorry, Centurion. My sappers have used up all their drone charges.”

  “Then wire them up with dumb bombs. Have them crawl to the bottom and blow themselves up. Use overloaded power-packs, force-blades—I don’t care. Make that hole another ten meters deep—you’ve got five minutes before I perm you myself.”

  I set him back on his feet and let him go. He hustled to his team and began kicking tail. They rushed with him, hustling like fresh recruits with a noncom on their heels.

  Natasha was my next target. She was working on her computer, as usual, and I pulled her around to face me.

  “Is the gateway as trashed as it looks like it is?” I demanded.

  She nodded. Her face looked wet, like she was about to cry or maybe had wiped away tears already. “I don’t know what to do, James. We’re—we’re trapped down here. No one will ever find us.”

  “You let me worry about that, girl. Just gather up what’s left of the equipment and haul it with us.”

  “With us? Where are we going?”

  I pointed down at the tunnel mouth in the floor. A booming series of flashes came up from the bottom of it.

  “Down there. That’s where the Devil lives, and we’re going to find him.”

  It took seven long minutes, but at last, the sappers broke through. Leeson had gone down the hole with them, leading by example. The last thud shook the floor of our chamber, and some troops lost their footing.

  “Leeson?” I called down over the smoking rim of what now resembled a crater. “Are you okay down there?”

  Only one of the sappers crawled back up to us. “Adjunct Leeson is dead, Centurion,” he told me. “He set a charge without a timer—we’re out of timers.”

  I nodded. “Did you break through?”

  “Break through to what, sir?”

  “To that big hollow area we’ve been trying to reach for nearly an hour!”

  “Um…. No.”

  I dragged him out of the hole and pushed him aside. He staggered away from me. I got down on all fours and crawled inside the slanting tunnel. A few troops called after me, but I ignored them. I had to see the situation firsthand.

  It was dank and dark down here. Dust was everywhere, and I had to flip my visor down to breathe. Squirming deeper, all the way to the end, I shoved Leeson’s flopping body out of the way.

  Smoking dirt, a few dribbling sands coming down from above—the whole tunnel looked unstable, and I thought it might collapse on me at any moment.

  Calling back up to the top of the hole, I demanded a weaponeer with a belcher be sent down. Instead, a clanking, rolling cylinder came to rest against my boots. Grunting, I reached back and dragged it forward.

  It was a belcher. Angry, I almost shouted at my troops, demanding to know why the weaponeer was too chicken to come down himself.

  But then, I checked the rosters. All the weaponeers were dead.

  With a shrug, I set up the weapon and cranked the aperture down to a tight beam. Years ago, I’d been trained to use these things. They were kind of clumsy, but versatile and tough. They rarely failed to operate. More fancy gear like smart missiles and the like could be jammed, packed with dirt and damaged just by banging them around, but not belchers. Say what you like about workhorse-level gear, it got the job done in the end.

  Using the shoulder-mounted cannon like a drill, I aimed it downward and began releasing short bursts of energy. The tunnel filled with vaporized rock and my suit began to heat up—but I kept firing. The key was to avoid damaging the unit by holding the firing stud down too long. Heat was the biggest enemy, as the muzzle could become white-hot in seconds.

  Pulses of energy won the day. Each pulse, lasting maybe half a second, dug a hole the size of a man’s skull out of the rocky earth. Applying the weapon like a jackhammer, I managed to get sixteen pulses out of it before the energy cell ran dry. I roared for a fresh cell until someone rolled it down on top of me. I ejected the old energy cell, tossed it aside, and went back to drilling.

  All in all, it took me about eight minutes to blow a hole through the floor into the vast chamber directly below it. I could only surmise that the roof of the lower chamber had been built with stronger materials. It was dense, tough, and hard to dig through.

  I’d come to respect the efforts of Leeson and his sappers. Sure, they’d failed to reach the bottom, but they’d given it their all.

  Unfortunately, when I finally broke through, I did so with all the sheer idiocy and lack of foresight the Vulbites had shown a few minutes earlier when they’d clawed their way through our ceiling.

  The irony of the situation, along with a number of regrets and foul curse words, ran through my mind as the bottom of the tunnel gave way and I fell, ass-over-tea-kettle, into the pitch-black unknown.

  -60-

  I landed with a crash on top of a pile of dry, crunchy pods. At first, I thought I’d smashed my armored ass down on a stack of skulls—that’s what it felt and sounded like. But after some rolling and swearing and looking around, I modified that perception.

  It was a pile of shed carapaces. That’s what Vulbites did when they grew bigger or when they died: they left behind a tough brownish shell. It was like the shell of soft crab, tough and leathery rather than hard and brittle.

  But my weight and the apparent dryness of the stack caused them to crunch and split apart. Being partly hollow, they also broke my fall.

  I stood cautiously on a mountain of carapaces that was perhaps five meters high. I looked up at the hole the ceiling.

  “Everyone! Jump down the hole!”

  The response didn’t come back immediately. Finally, Graves got on the line.

  “What have you found, McGill?”

  I panned around my suit cameras and relayed the view back to him. The chamber was large, much larger than the one I’d come from. There were mounds of carapaces here and there, some even bigger than the one I’d fallen into.

  “What’s the point of going down there?” Graves demanded.

  “We have to go somewhere, sir,” I told him. “At least there isn’t any sign of more Vulbites down here… yet.”

  Graves declared me to be six kinds of a retard, but at last he ordered the troops to follow me down. I had to scramble out of the way as they came rappelling into sight on ropes. Some just jumped, or threw gear down. Others used the few floaters we had with us to carry the wounded. These slid off to the sides of the cavern, the riders whooping until they came to a rest at the dusty bottom of the cave.

  Graves and I soon stood on open ground. “So… this is it?” Graves asked me. “You worked your ass off and lost an officer to get down here. At this point, I’m less than impressed.”

  “Let’s search the place, Primus.”

  We walked the perimeter as our troops frantically tried to set up a defense in case the Vulbites came through the ceiling again.

  “McGill,” Graves said. “I have to give you an ‘A’ for effort—but this is pretty hopeless. We’ve managed to dig down into a lower chamber, one that is even more empty and pointless than the first place we walked into. You do realize that sunshine and fresh air are above us, right? Not below?”

  “That’s not what I’m looking for, sir. The Vulbite billions are above us as well. Even if we did dig our way out of here, we’d never survive.”

  “So… why did we come down here? To prolong the inevitable? To give the men a sense of activity, rather than hopeless despair?”

  I looked at him closely. “It’s not like you to talk this way, Primus. Like a defeatist, I mean.”

  Graves straightened up and scowled at me. “I’m no chicken-shit crying on your shoulder. But I smell a perming, here, and I want to know if you’ve got anything in that head of yours that you’re not sharing.”

  I nodded. “I understand. I did have a plan—but it’s been blown. I’d hoped that we’d find a queen, or something we could bargain with.”

  “Right… our only hope then is Natasha. She wrapped up and brought down those damaged gateway posts. Maybe she can power them up and—”

  “Sirs!” shouted a younger recruit. He was one of Barton’s light troopers—a rare breed at this point of the campaign. Most of his fellows had died.

  Looking his way, we saw him frantically point at a pile of trash that was… moving. At first, I thought it might be some kind of earthquake. Then I realized it had to be Vulbites, digging their way into the chamber from underneath one of the big piles of loose carapaces.