Battle On The Marathon

by John Thornton

  Trotting away from the battlefield, I again tried the transceiver.

  “This is Corporal Kalju, does anyone hear me?”

  “Yes! You must be within two kilometers of Nuwa. MDF forces are in place in Nuwa. Proceed here as quickly as possible,” the LT’s voice replied.

  “Where are the Blue Tigers? Lieutenant Harpy, where is everyone?” I answered, and was surprised at the relief that was filling my heart just by hearing the LT

  “Corporal Kalju, you are the first one to make it here,” the LT replied. “I have taken command of the MDF forces here in Nuwa. Make your best time to Nuwa. Do not engage any enemy forces.”

  “Flashing strobe lights seem to be an effective defense! Inform the others. LT, I am not sure why that works, but it does. The helmet light, when set to strobe, somehow causes the Jellies to back off.”

  “Good confirmation, Kalju. Thanks.”

  “Where are Lazlo and the others? Have you contacted them?”

  “Negative, Kalju. Get into Nuwa as fast as you can. We have some new weapons. Do not engage the Jellies until you get here.”

  “Understood, LT.”

  As I approached the town, I saw a wall had been made of toppled over trucks, buses, and farm machinery. Between those vehicles, permalloy bars had been welded and heavy spikes of permalloy had been driven into the ground giving the wall a strange appearance. It reminded me of historical stories I had read about the ancient time called the middle-ages when parts of the old Earth had castles made of bricks and mortar. This new wall had tall poles about every hundred meters, with a set of flood lights at its top. Those flood light were aimed out and away from the town. From what I could see, that cobbled together wall stretched from the habitat’s side wall in a diagonal manner up to the end wall of the habitat. Perhaps three meters tall, on average, the wall was jagged, ragged, but intact.

  The road which led toward Nuwa let up to the wall, where there was a large gate which obviously had been hastily erected.

  Engineering automacubes were furiously working at digging a trench, or to use an antiquated term, a moat, next to that wall.

  “Lieutenant Harpy?” I asked through the transceiver. “I am outside the gate. How did this wall get built overnight?”

  “I am on the wall, and see you.” A figure stood up and waved. “Come inside quickly.”

  The gate’s mechanisms moved it sideways along tracks which had been anchored down into the ground.

  Inside that crude barrier, there was a span of several hundred meters before the first houses of Nuwa. I did not see any fires burning, and the buildings looked to be intact.

  The LT rushed over to me. Her own armored spacesuit had several large dents across its plates, and some rips in the fabric. She had seen battle, and her faceplate was open. Her now very short hair looked soaked in sweat, and her face was haggard.

  “Glad you made it here,” the LT said. “No one else with you?”

  “No. There were some farmers, I suppose you would call them, but they were killed by a Jellie. It came from a sewer system. Otherwise all the way from Sheba I saw no one else. No one alive anyway. Again, how did you get this built so quickly? And from what I saw the Jellies are coming underground, so will this wall of vehicles and metals stop them?”

  “Again, you are giving valuable confirmation. Well done, scout! There was a garage for trucks here in Nuwa, and some locals started placing that barrier after the first sirens. They just drove the trucks out and started building the barrier. For a long while, there had been frightening rumors of some kind of monsters in Lake Six, and the local civilians took it much more seriously than the Red Guard. I guess the locals were prepared and ready. I was not far from here when the attack happened.”

  “And the Blue Tigers who were searching the lake?”

  “No word on them, sorry.”

  “Just how bad was the attack here?” I looked up at the town and could see no real damaged places. “Back in Sheba it is a shambles. Countless dead in the streets and buildings.”

  “Some locals reported seeing Jellies moving from Lake Six into a sewer treatment access system. They found me, and I took action.” Her blue eyes looked far older than they were. “I blew stuff up, right away. From what we can tell, the Jellies are using the sewer systems for movement. They only tunnel out from existing sewers, or maybe other underground waterways. Gravitationally, Nuwa is at the uppermost level of the biome, and all sewage flows downward from here. That means the piping is smaller diameter. I decided to blow up and destroy every sewer passage that connected to this town. There were only six, and I had enough explosives to completely collapse those. I might have squashed a Jellie or two in those sewers, but I did not stick around to find out.”

  “They can be crushed with enough brute force. But it is very hard,” I replied. “Very hard.”

  “With the sewers gone, there are no operational toilet facilities anywhere in town now. An automacube is digging some slit-trench latrines for the population, and for MDF forces. I have ordered water rationing and food conservation measures as well.” She gestured at the tall poles with the lights. “A local fisherman suggested the lights, and we got those erected last night and turned them on. I am not sure how he knew, but he said something about creatures from the deep lagoons, or whatever. Now you confirm the strobes are effective. No Jellies approached very close. I hit the few who did pop up with the last rockets we had and launched grenades at them. Did not kill any of them, but with the strobe lights and the bombs, they kept away.”

  “How many forces are here?” I wondered how long the barrier could be defended, as I looked at its length and saw only three other soldiers, and they were all Red Guard. I wondered how they would do in battle.

  “The general population here is about two thousand, give or take. Counting you, Kalju, we now have about twenty combat troops in armor. You and I are the only Blue Tigers, but I still have hopes the others will make their way here. No Hellcats, and no officers from the Red Guard.” She hesitated a moment and then said, “The Red Guard officers abandoned their armor and fled somewhere. I saw three sets of armor that had been discarded.”

  “Like the Jellies will differentiate between combat forces and regular people?”

  “Come with me,” the LT said. She snapped off a few commands to the Red Guard who were on watch, and to my surprise they responded in a positive manner.

  We walked away from the barrier and its now sealed gate, and got to a small shop which was on the outskirts of the town. Inside was an eating establishment, with tables and chairs, and a kitchen area.

  “There is a working gravity conduit here. MC001 has been sending me prototype weapons,” she approached the back of the shop where there was a pedestal with the controls for sending and receiving items. “Cooking equipment and other assorted items are usually what comes through this conduit, but MC001 has modified that.”

  The LT tapped in a sequence on a nine-section color control pad on the side of that hexagonal pedestal. The top dilated open and some items floated up from the interior. They were resting on soft cushions.

  She picked them up and set them aside. Then she tapped in a command on the controls. The conduit closed. “Good! Another shipment of amvexs is on the way.”

  “Amvex?” I did not recognize the devices. They were each a bit larger than my fist in a generally roundish shape with a ten centimeter tail on the bottom. Overall each was a light blue color with a gray lever on the top. Below that small lever were three red lights. My mind told me this was some kind of weapon, but it was so different from hand thrown grenades, or launched grenades, I just was unsure what it was.

  “Like I said, prototype weapons. These are anti-matter variable explosives, meet the amvex. You can anchor it with the leg, or throw it. But be sure to set the timer here,” she showed me how to twist the top ring which rotated just under the trigger. “It has three setting. The red lights indicate a small, medium, or large explosion. That range, the dead zone of the
weapon, is two, ten, and twenty meters for the concussion and fragmentation blast. Nothing should be able to survive inside that dead zone. Nothing. They say it will work underwater as well. So, make sure you set the timer with sufficient time to get away, or get behind cover, from the destruction radius.”

  “Antimatter bombs?” I asked. I thought of Kulm and how he would have loved to see the engineering aspects of containing even small amounts of antimatter.

  “Right, the prototype amvex grenade. It should crack the shells, the carapaces, of those Jellies alright. It will also peel your own armor if you are too close. The concussive force is immense in the blast radius. I have yet to use them in battle, but the Jellies are in for a surprise.”

  “Who is making these?”

  The LT smiled, “Reproduction and Fabrication here in Queen. Although I have not been in direct contact with MC001 since the Jellies launched their attack. I believe that AI is aware of our plight here. I am able to send in requests, but obviously, the menu does not have antimatter grenades on it. I put in a generic supply order using my MDF identification codes, and these came through with a small and a printed instruction manual. Before the attack MC001 was researching new weapon systems, and IAM Lenore had approved field tests,” she slapped my shoulder. “I suppose we are the field test!”

  “How many amvex grenades do you have?”

  “Including the three here now?” she nodded at the bombs. “We have five. The first two came in last night, and now these three. Here, you take two of them. You are handy with weapons, and you seem to have been born under a lucky star, or something. You are the only one with a confirmed kill of a Jellie, and you made it across Queen on your own. I am impressed.”

  I fitted the amvex grenades into my armor where I could easily deploy them, yet where they were secure.

  “Kalju, get back to the barrier and stand watch with those Red Guard soldiers. The ones that are here are decent enough warriors, but their leadership just stinks, and they are disillusioned. I am not sure who they are more puzzled about. Is it the Jellies? Or is it their leaders who were so ignorant?”

  “What area of the barrier wall is most vulnerable?”

  The LT squeezed her lips with her fingers. Then she replied, “Up by the end wall, the wooded area comes right up to where we stacked some trucks. The engineering automacubes are digging our moat, which I intend to fill with anything I can find which is flammable. But that wooded area up there will be tougher for the automacubes to dig through because of the roots and trees. If I was planning an attack on Nuwa, that is where I would send my forces.”

  “With all due respect, LT, but if I were the Jellies I would find a way to tunnel under us all and come up inside the town somewhere. I know you blocked off the sewers, but I also know the Jellies can dig.”

  “Agreed. That is a problem, but with so much space, we cannot personally cover every square meter of the town. I have got all the other automacubes, what few we have—some transport, a few animal husbandry ones, and a couple of food service models—sitting at various locations, monitoring as best they can. They are sensing shifts in underground vibrations, mostly though touching pipes which lead down. It is a really rough approximation, and hardly covers the whole town, but it is all we can do. They are set to alert to any excessive vibrations. The general population is also watching. They are anxious to an extreme degree. They will report anything they see, and like you know, our transceivers will pick up messages from within a two kilometer area. Not the best, at all, but the best we have.” The LT adjusted some controls on her own transceiver. “You will now get an alert signal when the automacubes pick up suspicious vibrations.”

  “Any connections outside, like to Kansas, or to nonphysicality systems?” I asked again.

  “As soon as I make some coupling or link like that, you will know,” the LT stated. “The nonphysicality was shattered again. They hit us hard.”

  I turned to march out toward the location on that barrier wall, but the LT’s words stopped me. “Kalju? You are the only soldier here I fully trust. I am putting you as second-in-command. The rest of the MDF here will answer to you. I am sending out that appointment.”

  “I am barely a corporal. The Red Guard, are useless…” I stopped myself. “I will do my best.”

  I hustled over to that section of the barrier wall near the end of the biome. The wall there was less dense and more of a junk pile. Doors, bedframes, furniture, and other assorted items were wedged in between the trucks and trailers which made up the wall. A human could easily have scampered around or beneath or over the barrier, but as for a Jellie, I did not think they could get through as easily since their carapace mass was much larger than a human’s.

  Scanning the situation, I saw that the habitat’s wall extended far upward to where it met the sky tube and the biome’s ceiling. The light reflected off the end wall in ways I remembered from Kansas on the few times I visited the end of that biome. I saw along the barrier that the nearest pole with the flashing spotlights was about two hundred meters from the biome’s end. That was an excessive gap. I wished we had floodlight and strobes every meter to keep the Jellies away.

  I set up my watch post in the front section of an older truck. The roof of the cabin had been roughly cut off to allow someone to be inside the cab and have permalloy around and yet still be able to see out over the top.

  All that first day, I waited and waited. Yet, nothing happened. The most excitement I had was when several deer came out of the woods, and looked at the barrier wall in surprise. They darted away after briefly glancing around in puzzlement. Toward nightfall, the blue automacubes had worked their way along the barrier, digging the trench, and were coming close to my position. The trench would offer another obstacle to the Jellies just coming directly up to the wall, but I did not know what the LT was going to fill the trench with. She had mentioned flammable materials, but I wondered what items the town would have that could work for that idea. Or if flames would be any deterrent on the Jellies.

  As the sky tube darkened, I noted the light overhead had a grayish tint to it, probably from the many fires that had taken place. The air was hazy and looked thickened somehow.

  “Corporal Kalju?” The LT asked through the transceiver. “The night shift Red Guard will be there shortly to relieve you. There is a set up just on the outskirts of town where you can bed down for the night. A recharging station for the armor, as well as fresh foods, water, and a place to sleep. It should now be marked out on your town map. The automacubes will still be working on…”

  Her voice was interrupted by an alarm. A yellow automacube had sensed some vibrations emanating from an underground pipe it was monitoring. I was the closest troop to that location.

  “LT, should I check that?”

  “Yes, your relief is only five minutes away. Set the wall’s strobes on, and head over there to where the disturbance is located. It might just be another false alarm. Rats in water lines have set off other automacubes already several times today. I also chased down one very ornery racoon, which showed up in the ruins of the sewers. The wildlife seems to somehow be aware that they are safer behind our barrier. Let me know what you find,” The LT responded.

  I wondered about her statement that there had been other false alarms. The system must have been set to only alert the closest solider to the questionable finding.

  The blue automacubes were still excavating the moat, but had made considerable progress in clearly that trench through the wooded area. They had stacked up the wood, and were letting that dry. I flipped on the pole mounted lights, and sprinted off. The flashing of those strobes made the place look unwholesome, in some way.

  Nuwa’s buildings were different than those in Sheba, but of similar colors. The floorplans, architecture, and layout was more uniform and consistent. It was not as grid-like as the towns in Kansas, but the streets were more straight than winding. Reaching the spot where the yellow automacube was located, I came up to it fully alert. It
s manipulation arm was attached to the pipe which came up from below and was right next to a two-story house which looked to be made into twin living quarters. Some people were dressed in casual clothing and were on a balcony above where the automacube sat.

  “Have you seen or heard anything unusual?” I called out. My faceplate was still up, and I was trying to save my armored suit’s energy.

  “No attacking aliens,” a man called back. He had a holster around his waist, but he did not look like he had much by way of training. What I assumed was his family were standing around on that balcony. They reminded me of sheep in a field in Kansas who had been caught out in the rain. They just looked lost and leaderless.

  Squatting down next to the yellow automacube, I felt the pipe with my own hand. It was vibrating in a way that my suit’s fingers could even register. The transport automacube was very limited in what it could do, and the sensitivity of my spacesuit was not much better for tactile receptivity. Whatever was causing the vibration was unknown, but something was there. I looked back up to the people on the balcony.