Legacy (78 page)

“Look out,” Kwan shouted, as a giant three-fingered hand smashed through the wall and knocked Will over. Instead of grabbing Will it grabbed the next man in line. Sarah’s eyes widened as she recognized Sergeant Demarest, one of the older Green Berets on the mission. He was lifted out of the bunker and they all watched helplessly as Demarest and the arm vanished. Sarah thanked God the sergeant’s COM system was off.

Kwan waved the men ahead of him, indicating that they should go forward down the large ramp that angled downward at a 30 degree angle. He just hoped there were no more nasty surprises waiting for them at the bottom. As the men went, Sarah and the general followed, not knowing if they had found a covered haven beneath the bunker or if they had just found another way to hell.

*   *   *

As they continued heading down into the bowels of the ancient complex, Sarah placed her hand on the strange plasticlike wall. She stopped and felt the movement of the monstrosities above. It felt as though they were tearing the bunker system apart—perhaps trying to dig them out of the rat hole they could be heading into.

“You feel it too, yes?”

Sarah looked up and saw the general looking at her. He had stopped next to her, along with the comforting face of Will Mendenhall.

“They’ll dig and dig until they find us. It’s like their programming won’t allow them to do anything else,” she said as she lowered her gloved hand from the wall.

“I’ll tell you, whoever built them crazy bastards would have to be related to us somehow, because only our species could ever be so brutal,” Mendenhall said, shaking his head inside his helmet.

“I agree, Lieutenant Mendenhall,” Kwan said. “But I may venture to add, as long as it was beings like us that built them, it can also be counted on that those same beings can destroy them.”

“Unless, like us, they were just dumbass sons-a-bitches,” Will countered.

Kwan smiled, continuing down the ramp, following what was left of the three Moon expeditions.

“There again, you may have a point.”

As the three fell into line, the helmet lights bounced off of posters, possibly of rules and regulations, in the now familiar alien script. As Sarah looked, the posters began to look like U.S. Army bulletins on the do’s and don’ts of surviving in a hostile environment. There were depictions of space-suited men placing a finger to their helmets in a shushing gesture, possibly meaning loose lips sink ships. There were what looked like propaganda scenes on some of them, with flags, and even one that resembled the old World War I Uncle Sam pointing at the reader of the poster, as if saying, “I want you!”

“I’m getting the feeling these people just blew themselves straight to hell,” Will said as he tried to look more closely at one of the propaganda posters.

“Look at this one,” Sarah said.

Kwan and Will looked at what she was studying as the vibration from above them increased.

On a large and half-torn poster, their helmet lights revealed one very large moon, with what looked like transport ships leaving its surface. Below that was a picture of the mineral.

“Look familiar?” Sarah said, tapping the mineral.

“Looks like they may have been mining it,” Kwan said. “Is that our Moon?”

Sarah reached out and pushed the ripped corner back into place. As she did, all of their eyes widened. They saw a much smaller moon in the background of the first. Beside it was the Earth or at least it looked like the Earth. The continents weren’t in the right places.

“What the hell is this?” Mendenhall asked.

“My God, they were mining the mineral,” Sarah said, “but not from this moon. There was another moon that’s no longer there.” She reached out and slid up the other corner of the poster. That was when they saw it—another world in the far distance. This one had deep green oceans and red-colored continents.

“What planet is that?” Kwan asked.

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “But our hope of finding a source of the mineral on the Moon just went right out the window.”

“All the more reason to leave this place as soon as we are able to escape our enemies—which are growing closer as we speak,” Kwan said. He turned and started down the ramp once more.

Sarah looked at Will and shook her head and then stepped into line with the general.

Mendenhall wanted to curse as he slapped at the reproduced depiction of the mined moon Ophillias.

“I don’t like this moon very much,” he said. Then she looked at the second, much larger moon. “Or that one either.”

The men ahead had halted. Sarah looked at the altimeter readout on her right sleeve. The small computer screen told her they had traveled a distance of close to a half a mile in a downward attitude. She was starting to think they would find nothing but a basement.

“General, would you and Lieutenant McIntire come up here, please?”

Sarah thought she recognized the voice of Sergeant Stanley Sampson, one of her Green Berets, as she and Kwan, followed by Mendenhall, stepped up to the first man in line. It was Sampson, and he just pointed into a room that held a number of tables along with what looked like a cafeteria serving line.

“Chow’s on,” the sergeant said, and stepped aside to allow Kwan, Sarah, and Mendenhall to go through first.

“I don’t think we want to eat here, Sergeant,” Sarah said as her light picked up a pair of bodies in the far corner of the room. There were two large cups sitting in front of a mummified man and woman. They were holding hands across the table and their missing eyes seemed to be locked on each other.

“They must have come down here to die,” Sarah said, unable to remove her eyes from the long lost couple.

“Die of what?” Mendenhall said. The couple was having the opposite effect on him as on Sarah.

General Kwan stepped forward and reached for something. Sarah flinched, hoping he wasn’t going to disturb the couple. The woman had red hair and the man black. Their hands may have been locked together for millions upon millions of years, and Sarah felt they had no right to disturb their remains. Instead, Kwan turned and tossed a small object to Sarah, who had plenty of time to catch it in the nonatmosphere. She looked at the bottle and then handed it off to Will. It was empty, but all three of their imaginations could figure out that the couple had long ago taken a way out that was more to their own choosing. Sarah wondered how they could have become so desperate.

“Sir, we found something down here,” a Frenchman said as he scrambled into the doorway.

As Sarah turned, Will handed her the small bottle and fixed his eyes in the same direction as hers. The unspoken communication was such that they both knew they didn’t want to go out that way, or any other way that involved dying on the Moon. Sarah placed a gloved hand on Will’s shoulder and then moved away back to the long ramp outside. She followed the rest of the men and that was when she saw that they had come to the end of the wide ramp. There was a double set of doors and she followed the men through them. As she stood there, Sarah couldn’t believe her eyes. Lined up as though at an Army motor pool were vehicles—eight of them, ranging from small dune-buggy-type cars to three large transports with rounded bubbled cabs. All the vehicles had oversized tires; two of them were tracked. Several also had large cranes and derricks attached. They were facing toward what she thought was a dead end, but when she examined it closer she saw that it was actually a fifty-foot-wide roll-up door, sealed against the harsh external environment.

“Look at this,” one of the ESA men said, tapping a large glass or plastic container. Inside the vessel they saw about a hundred gallons of frozen water. There was thick piping running from the tank into a large pump, and then through the metal flooring into the lunar surface. The ancient lunar explorers had discovered the very thing NASA was looking for in Shackleton Crater—water. There must be an underground supply of ice. Somehow the visitors had found a way to melt it and pump it to the surface.

“Now this is what I call a neighborhood garage—cars, water, and tools. Now all we need are two-week-old hot dogs, overpriced gas, and a Big Gulp machine.” Will smiled and walked over to the first dune-buggy-type vehicle and looked in its interior at the unfamiliar gears and levers.

Sarah stepped up behind Will and tapped him on the shoulder as she looked at the strange shifters and dials.

“Well, I hope you can drive a stick and drink your Big Gulp at the same time, Mr. Wizard.”

General Kwan turned away from examining the interior of one of the heavier tracked vehicles as some of the men chuckled, a very strange sound considering their predicament.

“Excuse me, but what is this Big Gulp you speak of?”

GALLERY NUMBER TWO, MÜELLER AND SANTIAGO MINING CONCERN, 100 MILES EAST OF QUITO

Tram was actually zigzagging his way upward to the spot where Collins had fallen a few steps ahead of Everett. Down below, the giant robots were starting to root out the soldiers faster by the minute. They were tearing into solid rock and ancient lava to get at their hiding places. The noise of the attack along with the wiring and whine of the transformers and turbines echoed loudly in the large gallery. The screams and gunshots from their men were even louder.

Tram made it to the spot where Jack had been hit and gone down. As both men ducked and took cover, they were stunned to see that Jack wasn’t there. Everett looked around the area and placed his hand on a darkened spot near the rock wall. He lifted his hand and saw that it was blood.

“Damn it, Jack, where the hell did you go?” Carl asked as three explosions rocked the gallery below. As he looked up he saw that instead of the terrorists assisting the soldiers below by firing on the metal monstrosities, they were actually firing into the retreating soldiers.

“Sons of bitches,” Everett said, as he vaulted over Tram and continued climbing. The Vietnamese private waited a split second and then went in another direction.

Everett knew Jack was heading for the mortar pit. The problem was that they didn’t exactly know where it was on the high wall overlooking the gallery below. They hadn’t been shot at yet, so after Jack was hit they must have detoured their firing to another spot.

Everett knew that they and their men below were running desperately short of time.

*   *   *

The Mechanic made sure Alice was secure on the rocky incline and he raised his radio. A few minutes before he had seen several men run headlong into the blockhouse three hundred yards away.

“Place three rounds of HE into that blockhouse. There are men holing up in there.”

The Mechanic was getting ready to turn and face Alice once more when he saw a sight that froze him to the spot. There was a man approaching the mortar pit from above. He raised his radio, but knew the warning would come too late. He sent forward a squad of men, ordering them to kill that man and make sure they didn’t damage the mortar. He cursed himself for underestimating this American colonel.

He reached down and pulled Alice to her feet. For her part, she didn’t resist or try to twist away. The Mechanic saw the knowing smile on her face.

“Having problems down below?” she asked. “The colonel can be rather a pain in the ass, can’t he?”

The Mechanic shook Alice by the arm, making her wince but not cry out.

“The rest of you, we will change our position in case this American gets lucky. I want ten of you to get to the blockhouse by any means and kill everyone inside. Then bring me back the weapons. We will meet you at the gallery that leads to the underground river. Hurry, our transport is waiting.” He looked down at Alice. “I hope you can swim, old one. If not, you will remain with your friends forever in this underground hell.”

“Those metal monsters down there have more honor than you,” Alice said as she was pulled along the ridge.

“Then you will not mind spending your last minutes with them.”

*   *   *

Jack saw the three ammunition runners, two mortar men, and three guards—eight men altogether. He ducked his head back below the rocks where he had hidden himself. He checked his ammunition clip. He had seven nine-millimeter rounds. He then removed his KA-BAR knife from its sheath. He winced as he felt the broken rib where the bullet had lodged. He used his wrist to check the wound and knew he was bleeding heavily. He looked up and saw the two metal giants tearing into the hiding place where Sebastian had managed to lead most of the men.

Collins knew he was slowly bleeding to death, as the blood was flowing far too quickly from a wound he hadn’t initially thought that serious. He knew the bullet must have clipped an artery. He grimaced at his bad luck at not seeing the sniper guarding the mortar pit before it was too late. He shot the man who had shot him, but only after he had run headlong into his position, a move that had taken them both by surprise.

As he took the rocks one loose step at a time, another hollow thump sounded from below. Jack stopped and saw the mortar round arc into the cavern’s interior, where it nearly clipped the stalactites far above and then sailed downward. It landed mere feet from Sebastian’s entrenched troops. He even saw the first massive robot recoil from the explosion. Then, as if nothing had happened, the machine started digging, tossing large stones that appeared to weigh in excess of three tons out of its way. It recommenced pulling and prying at the stone and the long dead lava flow, trying to get at the troops.