Will McIntosh - Watching Over Us

Quinto took up the rear of the last carrier for the ride down into the mine. He was not a fan of deep holes with black walls, and when his CO had first laid out the mission Quinto had nearly crapped his own pants.

Macalena climbed in and took the seat beside him.

“So what are we looking for? I cannot for the life of me guess what we’re doing in here.”

Quinto smiled. It must seem an odd destination to the rest of the men, but they were used to being kept in the dark about missions. The fewer people who knew, the less likely the starfish were to get the information. Or so the logic went.

“The feds have been sealing huge caches of weapons in old mines for the past two centuries, waiting for the day when Argentina or India or whoever took out our more visible weapons depots. They coat them in Cosmoline and pretty much forget about them.”

Macalena frowned, sticking out his big lower lip. “You mean, old hand grenades and machine guns and shit?”

“More or less. Flamethrowers with a pathetically limited effectiveness range, eighty-one-millimeter mortars, LAW rockets, fifty-cal MGs.” Most were outdated weapons, but simple, easy to operate.

Macalena shook his head. “So we’re that desperate.”

In the seat in front of them a private who was at least seventy was clinging to the bar in front of her seat. She was tall—at least six feet. The slight jostling of the carrier was clearly causing her old body discomfort. It was true what they said: There were no civilians anymore, only soldiers and children.

“Yup. We’re that desperate,” Quinto said. “They’ve destroyed or seized so much of our hardware that we have more soldiers than guns.”

“What’s Cosmoline?” Macalena asked.

“I didn’t know, either; I had to look it up. It’s a grease they used back in the day to preserve weapons. Once you chip away the hardened Cosmoline, the weapons are supposed to be like new.”

Macalena grunted, spit off the side. “Dusty as hell in here. And cold.”

“Let’s be glad we’re not staying.”

Macalena’s comm erupted, a panicked voice calling his name.

“What have we got?” Macalena asked.

“Vance is dead. Lightning shot, from the trees to the left of the mine.”

“ All stop! ” Macalena shouted. The carrier slowed as Quinto dropped his head, covered his mouth as the implications sunk in.

Lucky no more.

“Where are you now?” Macalena asked the private.

“Inside the mine, about a hundred yards.”

“Stay there.”

Quinto looked up at Macalena, who raised his eyebrows. “What do you want to do?”

He wanted to get as deep in the mine as he could, and stay there, their backs against the wall, weapons raised until the starfish came to get them. Of course the Luyten would never come down, because they were reading his thoughts right now. Plus it was far easier to blow the mouth of the mine and leave them to suffocate.

Quinto ordered the small caravan to turn around and head toward the mouth.

They barely got moving before they heard the flash-boom of a Luyten explosive. The cave shook; bits of dirt and debris spewed at them, then everything settled into silence, the cave now truly pitch-black, save for the carriers’ headlights.

They climbed out of the carriers. Some of the troops cried, and there was no shame in that. One woman went off to the side of the tunnel and knelt in the rubble to pray. Quinto didn’t know their names, because he hadn’t served with them long. Troops came, and died, and new troops came. Only Lieutenant Lucky went on, mission after mission. Quinto realized he’d begun to believe he really was lucky, or special. Destined to see the war to its end.

It killed him, to think he wouldn’t get to see how things turned out, whether the bad guys won, or the good guys pulled something out of their asses at the eleventh hour.

Quinto used the walkie to apprise HQ of their situation, so HQ wouldn’t wonder when Quinto’s platoon never returned.

“Lieutenant?” Macalena said. He was studying the topo map he’d borrowed from Quinto. “Did you see these?” A few of the enlisted came over to look at the map over Macalena’s shoulder as he ran his finger along black lines set perpendicular to the mine. “There are five vertical shafts sunk along the length of the mine. I’m guessing they were escape routes in case of collapse, or ventilation, or both.”

Quinto looked up from the map, impotent rage rising in him. “Jesus, Mac, couldn’t you have waited a half hour to notice this?”

It took Macalena a second to understand. When he did, he grimaced, curled his hand into a fist, crumpling a section of the map. He turned and walked a dozen paces down the shaft, cursing quietly, viciously.

Even Macalena was too green for this war. He’d been in the infantry for only four months; before that he’d been writing military technical manuals. The army needed fighters more than writers these days.

If Macalena had waited even fifteen, twenty minutes before examining the old map, chances were the Luyten would have been out of range, and they could have climbed out of this hole and gone home.

“We need to move,” Quinto said. “The fish are going to find those exits and seal them up. Spread out, find the exits. When I get to the surface I’m going to set off a Tasmanian devil, give us some breathing room. As soon as it’s spent, get out there. Understood? Let’s move.”

“Couldn’t we just stay down here? Dig our way out when they’re gone?” It was the kid who’d crapped himself, looking absurd in Quinto’s big pants. “If we go up there now, they’ll kill us. I mean, maybe they’ll get distracted by something and leave…” He trailed off.

Everyone stared at the ground, except for the soldier who was praying.

“Let’s go,” Quinto said.

Quinto grasped the cold rung of the ladder that had dropped down when they unsealed the iron hatch.

“Good luck to you, Lieutenant,” one of the troops waiting to follow him called. It was Benneton, the old woman. The kid who’d crapped his pants was there as well, along with four others.

Quinto looked up into darkness. “Here we go.” He headed up the ladder. A lot of people who’d been as lucky as Quinto might have been tempted to believe the streak would hold, but Quinto knew his past held no hint of his future. More to the point, he knew he had no future.

It was a forty-foot climb according to the map, but adrenaline made it effortless. When he reached the top, he twisted the seal on the hatch, then pushed with his back and shoulders to force the hatch open. Daylight flooded into the dusty shaft as dirt and moldy leaves rained down on him.

The kid, who was just below him, passed up the Tasmanian devil. Reaching among the big spines jutting from the central carbon-fiber sphere, Quinto activated it, tossed it outside, and pulled the hatch closed.

The buzzing of razor-sharp shrapnel hitting, and then burrowing around inside everything within five hundred yards, would have been reassuring if Quinto weren’t absolutely certain the starfish had retreated outside the Tasmanian devil’s range as soon as Quinto thought about using it. At least it would back the fish up so they wouldn’t be able to pick off Quinto and his troops as they climbed out of their holes.

“Here we go,” Quinto said to the boy. “Have your weapon out. Run as fast as you can. Try to take one with you.” His guess was that Benneton would stay behind, shoot from the cover of the shaft until the Luyten cooked her. That’s what Quinto would do in her situation; it would probably afford her a few more minutes of life. He took a deep breath, trying to grasp that this was the end, this was the moment of his death, but he couldn’t.