by Ian Douglas
Turning again, Lee picked up the fishing-line harness, leaned into it, and pulled. One step…then another…then another…
The two wounded Marines together still massed a quarter of a ton…but once Lee got them moving, they moved. Slowly, awkwardly…but they moved.
CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1312 hours, Shipboard time
The injured Wheel defender had turned away from Doc and the wounded Marines, but now it was climbing up the slope toward Garroway and the rest of his fire team. To make matters worse, the pair of vehicles they’d ignored a moment ago—overriding the CCN’s control so they could help Doc—were now breasting the ridge top a scant ten meters away. They were coming up side by side, angled to keep their bellies parallel to the slope beneath them, giving Garroway a view of their smooth, black undersides.
Was the armor thinner there? “Sissy! Lock us on!”
Once again in control of the fire team’s weapons, the CCN AI painted a red triangle on the belly of the monster to the right. Garroway took aim…cursing wildly beneath his breath as he waited for other Marine weapons to come online….
And then Sissy fired his weapon and eight others simultaneously. The armor was thinner on the keels of those hovering nightmares, and the burn-through erupted as a savage, silent blast of vapor and hot debris that knocked Garroway off his feet and sent him sprawling onto his back.
The targeted war machine slammed suddenly to the ground, canted at an angle, its weapon uselessly probing the sky. Its twin slid over the lip of the ridge beside it, its weapon dropping to take aim at the three blast-scattered Marines.
Rolling onto his stomach, Garroway aimed his laser rifle. “Sissy! Gimme a lock!”
“Insufficient firepower available to successfully engage chosen target,” Sissy’s voice replied with a maddening lack of emotion. “Recommend immediate E and E to avoid hostile fire….”
“Fuck you!” Garroway yelled. Springing to his feet, he dropped his 2120 and charged forward, rushing the oncoming machine. He was already so close to the drifting behemoth it couldn’t pivot fast enough to bring its weapon to bear. Garroway leaped, arms outspread, and landed on top of the machine’s curved surface, legs dangling off the rim. The machine tilted alarmingly under Garroway’s weight, seesawed a moment, then stabilized itself. It began rotating swiftly, as though trying to dislodge its unwanted rider. Garroway, clinging to a handhold among the innumerable fist-sized raised blocks and angular depressions across the uneven surface, rolled his legs up and onto the top, then fumbled at his gear satchel for a block of CTX-5.
CTX-5 was a chemical explosive enhanced by dithermal exotics, as powerful a bang in a single book-sized package as it was possible to make. You armed it by pushing one of two pressure plates. The first caused the package to reform to the convex configuration; clip that side to a claymore pack—a package containing seventy lead-uranium ball bearings, and you had a charge triggered through your implant that fired the balls like a shotgun blast in a broad footprint. Press the other plate and the pack rearranged itself in the concave configuration, creating a shaped charge with a highly focused blast, like a concentrated, armor-piercing jet of white-hot plasma.
Garroway pressed the second plate, reached over the rim of the vehicle, and slapped the charge against the belly. So long as the link-connect points in his glove were in contact with the CTX pack, he could access its simple-minded controls through his implant. A thought-click fired the nanoseal on the base plate, welding the pack to the armor. A second thought-click triggered the five-second countdown. He rolled off the pivoting vehicle and hit the ground with a thud that nearly knocked the wind out of him. He felt a wave of pins-and-needles prickles wash across his legs and up his back and realized the machine was passing directly over his prone body.
He rolled, trying to get out from under. The machine accelerated, turning to track Geisler, who was farther away and, therefore, an easier target.
Then the CTX exploded, the detonation silent in hard vacuum but dazzlingly bright to unshielded eyes, the focused blast stabbing through the vehicle’s rim and up and out the upper surface like a geyser of white light. The back-blast beneath the vehicle caught Garroway and flicked him aside, at the same time lifting the massive machine’s side up and over, flipping it onto its back.
Whatever mag-lev technology the thing used to hover and move, it didn’t work upside down. The war machine slammed to the uneven ground belly-up and back-broken.
Which left the third Wheel defender, the one that had been chasing Doc and the wounded Marines downslope. Garroway grabbed his laser rifle and hurried back to Cavaco and Geisler’s position, dropped to his belly, and took aim at the advancing monster. Damn it was fast!
“Lock us on, Sissy!” Cavaco yelled.
“Insufficient firepower available to successfully engage chosen target,” Sissy replied. “Recommend immediate E and E to avoid hostile fire….”
This time the hostile vehicle was too far away to try taking it out with a CTX pack. The machine fired, its particle beam bolt slamming into the hard metal slope just below Garroway’s position. The blast knocked him back from the edge of the rift, sending him sprawling once more. Stunned, he tried to get up, tried to find his laser rifle. Somehow, he’d dropped it, accidentally this time, in the explosion. Geisler and Cavaco were both down as well. The armored vehicle crested the ridge, pivoting to take aim once more. Garroway tensed, readying to dive for cover….
Hovering ten meters away, the hostile machine came apart in a violent blossom of silent white flame. The entire front half of the machine was ripped away, and the wreckage crumpled to the black metal ground.
Garroway stood where he was a moment longer, scarcely daring to believe what had just happened. How?…
“C’mon, Marines!” Kat’s voice called over the platoon channel. “Stop gawking and get the lead out!”
Kat and Sergeant Morton emerged from behind the wreckage of the Wiggler machine Garroway had killed. Morton had just braced his Onager tube on the wreckage and sent a 7-kilogram missile streaking into the last hostile from point-blank range.
“That was my last missile,” Morton said. “Let’s vam for the inner perimeter!”
“Hold on a sec,” Garroway said. “We have some people out there.”
He pointed downslope and to the left. Doc, it seemed, was making good time across the Wheel’s surface a hundred meters away, dragging two armored bodies on a bright silver blanket.
“Let’s give ’em a hand,” Cavaco said. “Marines do not leave their own behind!”
HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1314 hours, Shipboard time
They were his men and he wasn’t leaving them behind.
Step by agonizing step, Lee dragged the two armored men back toward the Marine lines. The thermalslick’s frictionless feature wasn’t perfect, and Houston’s boots kept dragging on bare ground. At least it allowed him to get the heavy mass of the two wounded Marines moving, as though he were pulling them across a sheet of ice, and once they were in motion, they tended to stay in motion, gliding along behind Lee as he slogged ahead, straining at the line taut across his torso armor.
But it wasn’t ice. By the time he’d gone thirty meters, the frictionless surface of the sheet was beginning to wear away and progress became slower. He pulled harder, leaning into the line, but the black underside of the blanket was losing its slippery surface.
Damn. How much farther? His helmet display was zoomed out to show the entire Cincinnati AO all the way back to the inner cordon they were forming around Memphis. Green points of light marking other Marines were clustered heavily around the second perimeter, but he was almost alone out here…a good kilometer to go to reach the HQ area and only four—no, five—Marines anywhere close.
“Well done, Doc,” Cavaco told him. “We’ve got ’em.”
They slipped the tow line off over his helmet, and he sagged to the ground, exhausted, legs trembling.
“Blanket stretcher!” Garroway said. He appeared to have lost his rifle—a sin for a Marine—but he grabbed one corner of the foil blanket, lifted…and almost fell when it slipped through his gloved fingers like water.
“You’ve got to roll the edges over,” Lee told him. “Like this.”
There was enough buckyball surface on the edges of the blanket to make it tough to hold, but by rolling a corner over on itself, silver side out, it was possible to hang onto the stuff. A moment later, Garroway, Cavaco, Vinton, and Morton each had a corner of the blanket and were hauling the two armored forms toward friendly lines, with Lee and Geisler to either side, gripping the middle and trying to take on some of the weight. The load was heavy, and movement awkward, but they made good progress.
The good news was that the Wheel’s defenders appeared to have broken off their attack. There were no red pinpoints on their HUD map displays, no more enemy machines drifting up out of the valley behind them.
And ten minutes later a detachment of twelve more Marines met them, providing an armed escort back to safety.
Marines do take care of their own.
AO Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1340 hours, Shipboard time
“The attack appears to have broken off,” Warhurst told Ramsey. “At least for now.”
“Well done,” Ramsey’s voice said over the link. He could hear the relief in the man’s voice. “Very well done.”
“Wasn’t me, General. But I’ll pass that on to the guys and gals who did it.”
“Do that. What’s the bill?”
“Right now…” He reached up through his implant and pulled down the latest casualty figures off the command net. “Thirty-seven dead. And fifteen wounded.”
“Fourteen percent.”
“It could have been worse, General. Much worse.”
“Roger that.”
It was frankly surprising that there’d been as many wounded as that. Combat in the vacuum of space is relentlessly unforgiving. Even with advanced suit technology, even a minor wound was all too often fatal.
“Tell me something, though. According to the data we have here, the enemy didn’t retreat. Did you knock out all of them? A one hundred percent kill?”
“That’s the damnedest thing, sir. No. We counted a total of ninety-seven enemy tanks. We knocked out every one that broke through at Milwaukee and Cincinnati. There was another column threatening AO Toledo. We took out about ten of those machines before they reached our lines—that was, we’re guessing, thirty percent of that column. The rest of them, General, I swear, they just faded away into the ground. No retreat. They’re just…gone.”
“That does not exactly fill me with confidence, Major. You’ve checked to make sure they’re not just dug in, I take it.”
“Yes, sir.” He did not add “of course.” The general was operating in a zone staff officers detested—not enough information—and he had to explore every possibility. “I’ve had teams out there looking at what’s left. I don’t think the Wigglers manufacture their tanks. I think they grow them.”
“Nanufacture?”
“That, or a process just like it, sir.”
“Then you and your people ought to be dead, Major. How do you account for that?”
“Sir, at this point I don’t. There’s just not enough data to make even a half-assed guess. Still, my teams have examined a number of the vehicles we killed. Here…take a look at this.”
He uploaded imagery from the helmet sensors of one of his recon teams. They watched the scene unfold noumenally—one of the enemy vehicles, its front half sheared off, exposing the interior.
There was no internal compartment, no place for a crew. Various silvery mechanisms and components appeared to be imbedded within jet-black metal. The metal had a spongy look to it, as though it had been a bubble-filled liquid that had solidified unevenly around the gas pockets.
“No two are exactly alike,” Warhurst explained, “but they all possess the same components. A mag-lev drive system. A power plant. A particle accelerator weapon. And a distributed electronics system that probably serves as both communications and control.”
“You’re telling me these things are robots.”
“Yes, sir…that, or they’re teleoperated from somewhere inside the Wheel. I’d like it if Cassius could take a look at some of these things and see what he can pick up.”
“Done.”
“Our guess is that the Wiggles take manufactured components, like the drive system, and use some variant of nanotechnology to take the Wheel’s surface material and close the shells of these things around them. Quick and dirty.”
“So the ones that got away?…”
“Either they were reabsorbed into the surface, guns, drives, and all, or they passed through the surface and into the underground regions of the Wheel. There may be tunnels or some sort of highway system down there.”
Ramsey grunted. “With technology like that…why didn’t they just grow a few hundred of the things out of the Wheel’s surface smack in the middle of your perimeter?”
“I don’t know, sir. I’m just glad they didn’t. Best guess? The manufactured components are positioned at widely separated points, scattered all over the face of the Wheel. They grow the shells around the innards in place, then have to assemble the completed vehicles into larger groups…the columns they sent after us.”
“Yeah, but if those things can pass right through solid nickel-iron, they could’ve grown the things underground, assembled them underneath Point Memphis, and surfaced them all at once.”
“General, we just don’t know enough about the alien technology. The fact that they didn’t suggests that they can’t, and for that I am profoundly grateful.”
“Roger that, Major. Roger that.”
Warhurst knew just how lucky the Marine landing force had been. Out of almost a hundred defending machines, the Marines had knocked out at least sixty. But if the survivors had gotten loose inside the perimeter as a unit instead of in scattered twos and threes, Marine casualties would have been much higher than fourteen percent.
“When can we expect to be reinforced, General?”
“We’re loading the follow-on forces on the TRAPs now, Major. Daring and New Chicago are en route now, to take up positions for close fire support, should that be necessary. Ten hours. You’ll have fighter support back within five hours, however.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you hold?”
“I guess we’ll have to, General. We’ve expended most of the available Onagers. However, some of our Marines developed some rather up-close and personal techniques for dealing with enemy tanks. We may be able to…” Warhurst broke off. A flashing light in his noumenal awareness indicated an important message incoming on a different channel. “Excuse me, General. An urgent message.”
“Take it.”
He switched mental channels. “Go.”
“Major? This is Giotti. Sir…I thought you should know. We’re almost through the surface. Five minutes.”
Warhurst checked his internal clock. The engineering team had estimated forty-five minutes and taken only thirty-five. They were padding their estimates again, damn them.
“Well done!” He shifted channels again. “General? That was my engineering squad. They’re almost through the Wheel’s surface. I need to issue orders to deploy my recon company.”
“Keep me patched in.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
Analyses of the battle would wait. Right now, a whole new battle was about to unfold.
And th
is time, the Marines would be taking the fight to the enemy.
Inside the Wheel.
17
2 APRIL 2170
CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1350 hours, Shipboard time
“Recon Company, First Platoon! Saddle up, boys and girls! We’re movin’ out!”
The fact that Dunne had called them Recon Company instead of Alpha told Garroway something special was up. Long, long ago and very far away, Alpha had been designated as MIEU-1’s reconnaissance company, which meant they would be going into the Wheel’s interior first.
He’d only just staggered into the frenzy of activity that marked the HQ area at Point Memphis, surrendering Houston and Tremkiss to Chief Mattingly and three other company corpsmen. They were organizing a field hospital next to the headquarters, preparatory to bringing in a medevac TRAP. Around them, Marines were busily creating prepared positions, delineating a new, inner defensive perimeter with a radius of less than two hundred meters encircling Point Memphis.
Nearby, a number of Marines were completing the emplacement of a set of RW-42 sentry guns. These were twinbarreled pulse laser weapons with a cyclic rate of 10 shots per second, mounted on three-meter-high towers and remotely controlled by the CCN AI. They took time to unship and set up, which was why they hadn’t played a part in the first battle, but they would increase the landing force’s fire-power considerably.
In all the bustle, it was tough finding any one Marine. He used the ID locator on his HUD map to spot Gunnery Sergeant Dunne.
There he was, at the center of a growing team of Alpha Company Marines.
“Hey, Gunny!” he called, approaching the group.
“What?”
“Corporal Garroway, reporting as ordered. But, uh, I kind of lost my weapon.”