The problem was that he couldn’t see any way out of the encounter.

Certainly, they could turn tail and run, but the thought left a bitter taste in his mouth to even contemplate. Military units were only as good as their traditions, in Roberts’s opinion. The NAC had a short history, but its military traditions went back hundreds of years, just the same.

To begin the NAC Interstellar Armed Forces with the act of abandoning a world to genocide would be setting a precedent of the worst kind. A tacit approval of the act in implication, even if not in fact. It would be a tradition not only of dishonor but of perceived cowardice.

The problem, however, wasn’t in the dying.

Commander Roberts was willing to die for his own people or for the strangers, because that was what his duty demanded. However, his intellect would not permit his emotion to forget the fact that Earth knew nothing of their situation, and if they died out here on this day, Earth could well follow them into the abyss because they had failed to provide data vital to the survival of the human—the Terran—species.

In the middle of his contemplation, the door behind him whisked open and he saw the people around him stiffen. Roberts shook his mind clear.

“Captain.”

“Bring that carnivore down to three thousand meters,” Lieutenant Savoy ordered as he and his team stood observing the great wreck they had made of the already wrecked lander.

They were standing about a hundred meters from it now, watching the settling debris through their enhanced HUDs as they waited for the information from the carnivore’s ground-penetrating radar to come back.

The signal was fuzzy at first, the initial pass only returning a low-resolution scan, but their fears were confirmed as subsequent passes cleared up the signal.

The tunnels showed up plainly, long lines extending dozens of meters down and out from the lander, with several branches that extended in all directions like the limbs of an inverted tree.

Or perhaps like the roots of a virulent weed.

Inside the tunnel spaces, some pictures showed places that were blocked in, while others would later show those spaces to be quite clear. The pattern was overlaid rapidly, scans being taken every few milliseconds apart, while played back in a real-time sequence.

They could almost make out the flailing limbs of the drones as they crawled through the tunnels and continued their digging.

“The estimates are coming back now, boss,” Mehn said. “The computer says that there’s a ninety percent probability that there are over two hundred and eighty of them down there.”

Savoy nodded. “Tell it to keep counting.”

“You’ve got it, boss.”

Savoy flicked over to another com-channel, accessing into the command. “Well it’s confirmed, Major. We’ve got a nest or something being built under our feet.”

“We’ve also got the sky about to fall on us, Lieutenant.”

“Sir?”

“Six more cruisers are up there. In less than twelve hours we’re going to have to fight or flee,” Brinks said, his voice grim.