Conquest (Star Force Series)

by B. V. Larson

  The cool beach breezes dried my sweat. The smoldering craters around us stank of burnt charcoal and dust. I hugged Sandra then, armor to armor. I think I surprised her, but she didn’t resist. Our battle suits scraped and groaned slightly at the pressure.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I plan to go down there and hit them first.”

  She studied my face. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. I really shouldn’t be.”

  I expected her to become angry and try to talk me out of it. But she didn’t. Maybe she thought I was right, and it was the only thing to do. Or maybe she realized that I would do it anyway. In any case, I didn’t bring it up again. We walked through the smoking mess that had hours ago been a tropical paradise. I was sad, rather like walking through the ashes of one’s own home.

  “Let’s see if the officer’s mess is still serving,” I suggested.

  She agreed and we headed toward the sagging doors. One wouldn’t budge, having been folded down by the building when it leaned forward like an old man that’s taken a hard blow. I forced it with my armored hands. The metal screeched and groaned as it came reluctantly open.

  Inside, we found the officer’s mess serviceable, if abandoned. Kwon and his team were in the area, digging people out of their bunkers. Most of the base personnel had survived. We had drinks until the kitchen people showed up. When they finally did, we were pretty well lit. With big smiles, we welcomed them to the facility, still wearing our battle armor.

  The cooks gave us odd, sidelong glances. They looked away quickly when we returned their gaze. I didn’t care. I hammered the table until it dented, and demanded a good meal. I didn’t care what it was, as long as it was hot and tasted good.

  After awhile, they came up with a shrimp dish they called camarones salvajes. It was a seafood plate full of wonderful flavors. Shrimp, marinated octopus, calamari and mussels, all mixed with black olives, roasted peppers and tomato. There was other stuff in there I couldn’t identify, but it all tasted hot and good.

  We polished off a bottle of wine, but I made sure I didn’t reach the point of actual drunkenness. Sandra became loud and silly, and when we finally left the place, I think the staff was glad to see us go. I gave them a tip they wouldn’t soon forget and my first thought was to lead my girl back to our bungalow. We headed that way, but soon were reminded our home wasn’t in the best condition. It was demolished, smashed to sticks by a strike on a nearby building.

  “Hmm,” I said, realizing I wasn’t going to get laid in this place anytime soon.

  Sandra gave a deep sigh, but she didn’t start crying. I think before our campaign against the Worms and the long journey home fighting against the Macros, she would have broken down. Now, she understood that things were just things. As long as the people you cared about were alive, crying wasn’t worthwhile.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said, then led me down to the sea.

  It was getting dark now, but when we took off our battle suits and slipped into the waves, they were very warm. I looked off down the beach and saw a lot of dead sea creatures on the sand. All the hits in the water had killed thousands of fish. I turned her away from the washed up bodies.

  “Why here?” I asked.

  “Because those damned turrets can’t see us now,” she said. “I want to have some fun before you fix them all and they stare at me again.”

  I laughed, and as the darkness fell we enjoyed ourselves in the waves. The water still felt warmer than usual, almost hot, but I’d checked my Geiger counter before we went out there. It registered increased activity with a mild amount of clicking. It was nothing a couple of Star Force marines couldn’t handle.

  -23-

  About thirty-six hours later, a fresh dawn broke over Andros. The radioactive clouds had dissipated, brought to Earth by a light drizzling rain. I stood in my battle suit alongside a good five thousand of my comrades. We were organized in tight units, because radio transmissions were going to be our biggest problem. I’d spent the last day and a half coming up with solutions.

  The normal means of communications underwater consisted of either sonic signals—essentially shouting at one another with directed vibrations, or very low frequency radio. Of the two, VLF radio was much less workable. Conductive seawater was not a good medium for radio transmissions of any kind, but with long wavelengths and huge antennas it could be managed over distances of several hundred yards. Unfortunately, using low frequencies meant really long antennas—much longer than a man was tall.

  We had the opposite problem with sound. It traveled too far and worked too well. A good loud noise under the ocean, such as a dolphin’s clicking, carried quite a distance. Whale songs went the furthest, in some cases thousands of miles. I didn’t know how sensitive the Macros were to underwater sounds, but I figured our clanking along in armor was going to be noisy enough.

  In the end, we decided on a hybrid strategy. We would use sound only for longer range communications. After all, it worked pretty well for the whales. We used radio for close, whispered conversations between soldiers in the same unit.

  I built a brainbox attached to a directional hydrophone it could manipulate and had a non-com in every unit carry one. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked. The biggest problem with this sort of communication was the lack of security. If the Macros were listening, they would hear our command chatter. Accordingly, I ordered each team to maintain sonic silence until the battle began, barring some kind of disaster.

  Every company had to operate independently under this model, due to isolation. We had suit radio, but that didn’t work very well under the waves. A man’s normal shouting voice on the beach had more range than our radios did at the bottom of the ocean. Separating into companies of one hundred marines, we each had a geographic location we were to get down to. We weren’t sure where the enemy was in the trench, but we were going to have to find them on foot. It was a shotgun approach, but I didn’t know what else to do. We’d tried getting aerial photos and using sonar, but hadn’t seen much down there. Anyone who has searched deep water for a shipwreck can tell you it’s easier to find a rock on the Moon than find an object at the bottom of the sea. Essentially, you had to go down there and look around.

  “Kwon,” I said, clanking out onto the beach, “let’s move our team out.”

  “Moving out, sir!”

  We weren’t the first ones to enter the sea. I’d already sent twenty companies forward. I had them fly out over the waves first so they could move faster, but when the water got deep—which it did with alarming suddenness a about a mile offshore—they were to drop down directly, hugging the cliff and letting gravity do the trick. They sank like stones, or maybe like big steel bricks.

  Soon, it was our turn to move out. We engaged our repellers and left the sandy beach behind. We leaned our bodies forward and increased our speed. The repellers pushed us forward and away from the water at the same time. Like a hundred strange little helicopters, we flew over the cresting whitecaps. As we sailed over the waves at around a hundred knots. Every marine left a white line of froth in the water due to the pushing of his repellers in the bright, Caribbean-blue surface.

  “Is it okay to use radio while flying, sir?” Kwon asked me.

  “Yes, as long as we don’t overdo it and keep the power low on our transmissions. As I said in the briefing, the signals won’t get down to the Macros through the seawater.”

  Kwon pointed overhead. “What about them?”

  “The enemy fleet has withdrawn to higher orbit, I’m happy to report. They apparently don’t want to sit close to the Earth’s surface.”

  “Why have they pulled back?”

  “Maybe they think we could nuke them in a surprise sucker-punch. I wish we had a hundred subs waiting to do just that, but we don’t.”

  Kwon stopped asking questions. It was just as well, because we’d reached the end of the line. It was easy to see where the land-shelf ended from an aerial view. This close to it, I found it harder to tell. The wat
er did look somewhat deeper blue. Below us was a cliff thousands of feet deep. I leaned back and halted my forward motion.

  “Slow down, this is it,” Kwon shouted, seeing my move.

  The company clustered around, tipping their helmets awkwardly to look down in the water. “Let’s drop,” I said, and I switched off my repellers.

  The water splashed around me and I sank with dramatic speed. Being accustomed to being much more buoyant, it was alarming to go down so fast. I felt like I was drowning. I watched as dark cliffs covered in crusty growths whirled past my faceplate. I looked up and saw a spiral of bubbles spinning away overhead toward the silvery surface. Below, the water was deep blue. As I continued to drop, the water above grew darker and the surface was no longer discernable. Below, the sea had turned an oily black.

  I snapped on my suit lights. A dozen others did the same all around me. Their existence was a comfort.

  Normally, a dive like this took many stages and an ever increasing level of pressure inside the suit which had to be built up carefully to avoid popping eardrums and other unpleasant things. Fortunately, I had a team of about a zillion nanites working internally to balance out my body. On the way back up however, I knew we would have to take it slower to avoid decompression sickness, nanites or no.

  My suit hissed and creaked as the pressure increased. The battle suits performed remarkably well as one-man submarines. This was accidental, but I was still proud of the design. When I’d planned the systems, I’d been thinking of the rigors of open space with all its deadly dangers. One of them was great pressure, of course. I wanted these systems to function effectively on high gravity planets, worlds with high atmospheric pressures and wild variations in temperature and radiation. I’d considered undersea combat, but only as a remote possibility. I had had no inkling that these suits would see their first real combat test under Earth’s own oceans.

  “Any problems?” I signaled Kwon.

  I heard a fuzzy, static-filled response. I cursed. I didn’t know how far away he was, but I’d hoped we would be able to converse over more than a few yards distant. I was immediately tempted to use sonic communications, but sternly forbade myself. I had to follow my own orders just like everyone else.

  It had been such a long, sliding fall I’d almost forgotten to look for the bottom. Looking was futile in any case, as there was nothing to see outside the shaft of my suit’s chest lights other than more dark ocean.

  A warning beeper sounded, and I barely managed to squeeze the hand control in my glove that started up my repellers in time. Boulders shot up on either side of me. I heard clanking and crashing as marines slammed their armored boots into them all around. The bottom came crunching into my boots with shocking speed.

  “We’re down,” I said. “Activate repellers. Relay the warning.”

  In my helmet, I heard a dozen voices shouting to each other over the com-links. Many were indecipherable. I took a moment to examine the bottom of the cliffs. We’d done a lot of brainstorming about what the Macros intended to do down here. One theoretical plan we’d come up was the possibility of building digging machines and sending them to Andros Island via a network of tunnels. I hadn’t found evidence of tunnels, however. I suspected they planned to march up out of the sea and onto the shoreline when they were ready.

  I soon located Kwon. He was trying to pull a man out from between two closely-parked boulders. The marine had the green suit-lights of a non-com. He seemed unhurt, but one big boot was stuck.

  “Is everyone okay, First Sergeant?” I asked.

  “No, sir,” he said, grunting and heaving at the bounder on the right. It had leaned in and was covered in sharp thorny growths.

  “Casualties?”

  “One man I’ve found didn’t make it. He’s over there.”

  I turned to see a dark shape lying draped over more broken rocks. I turned back to the trapped man. The living are always more important than the dead, so I reached out to help.

  I’d thought the bottom would be free of life, but maybe this had fallen from above recently. I joined him and the three of us working together managed to free the man’s foot without ripping it off and killing him. Afterward, I moved over to the dead man. He was a private, his suit’s red LEDs told me that. The lower half of the lights were out, however. I saw a gap in the suit and shook my head. It had split open at the waist, allowing the pressure of the mile-deep ocean inside. Had he tried to take it off? Or had the suit malfunctioned somehow?

  I considered my own control systems. I thought I might have the answer. The suit had emergency buttons near my face inside the helmet. If I twisted my neck and brought down my chin hard, the emergency release would trigger. Maybe when he’d come down and jarringly struck the seafloor, this man had done exactly that by accident. I grimaced. A redesign was required.

  “What happened to him?” Kwon asked, looming near.

  Kwon made me startle. He reminded me of some huge, scary sea creature looming out of the dark water. I’d had to specially order his suit. The factory standard issue unit just hadn’t fit right.

  “My fault,” I said. “I need to reprogram the suit units. In low pressure, the suits are built to prevent accidental opening. That way, this couldn’t happen out in the vacuum of space. I hadn’t considered that high pressure could be just as deadly.”

  “Ah,” Kwon said. He promptly relayed a warning to the nearest marines, who were now gathering around.

  A dozen red-lit men talked among themselves. No doubt they figured Riggs’ Pigs were about to earn their reputation for insane losses once again. I allowed the chatter for now.

  I opened the dead man’s suit, attached an emergency line to his wrist and inflated the balloon. In seconds, he was shooting toward the surface. When he arrived, the balloon would begin beeping an emergency signal, and the body would be picked up. The system had been intended as a lifesaver, but it worked just as well to send corpses to the surface in a hurry.

  “One down, ninety-nine to go,” muttered one of the men.

  “Belay that shit, marine!” Kwon barked, clanking into the midst of the men. “Was that you, Swenson? I’m going to check the logs when we get back.”

  “Sorry, First Sergeant.”

  I felt like telling Kwon to let it slide, but that wasn’t the way discipline was maintained in my unit. I let Kwon do his job, so I could do mine. I ignored the entire affair and engaged my repellers. Moments later I had a fix on our gathering point and glided toward it. A throng of quiet marines followed me. We were already a few minutes behind schedule.

  -24-

  Due to the particulate matter floating around in any ocean and the powerful nature of our lasers, I didn’t know how our weapons would perform in the undersea environment. Tests had shown our projectors were effective at short range, but there were many practical problems. Earth science had developed uses for lasers underwater, such as welding, since the nineteen-nineties. But our weapons were an order of magnitude more powerful.

  The intense beams tended to heat up the cloudy water as they passed through it, causing steam bubbles to form, especially around the projector units themselves. This was problematic, as the bubbles obstructed the beam, reducing its striking power. The final result of these difficulties was that our weapons did work, but only over a short range and only for short bursts of duration. Over longer ranges or longer durations, their effectiveness dropped off dramatically.

  Still, our lasers were the best weapons we had. I could have tried to design some kind of harpoon with an explosive charge, maybe, but I didn’t have time. I didn’t want to leave the Macros down here unmolested, festering at the bottom of our ocean. I didn’t know exactly what their plans were, but I was certain I didn’t want them to succeed.

  We kept moving and reached our battalion gathering point unmolested. Three other companies were there, waiting. There were supposed to be a total of five, including us. I talked to the captain of each company and determined they’d not met any resistance.r />
  Several minutes went by. When the last company didn’t show up, I became concerned. I ordered the rest of the men to follow me, backtracking along the route the fifth company should have taken from the cliffs. Kwon came up beside me as we glided over the seabed on a gentle decline that led ever deeper into the ocean trench.

  “Uh, sir?” he asked.

  I knew what was bothering him without asking. This looked like a detour that would delay our planned search pattern and put us out of position relative to the other battalions that were moving over the seabed looking for the Macros.

  “We are down here to search for the Macros, First Sergeant,” I told him. “One company is missing, that’s evidence of Macro activity.”

  “Yes sir, but aren’t their domes supposed to be further ahead?”

  “No other units have reported in sonically,” I told him. “They are all probing forward, but not finding anything. I believe there is something nearby, between us and the cliffs.”

  “But wouldn’t the company have called in if they met the Macros?”

  “Not if their communications man was killed fast enough.”

  Kwon made a troubled-sounding grunt. I kept pressing ahead. Spreading out on all sides of me were four companies of marines. If there was something out here, we were going to find it.

  When we did, it came as a surprise. My first thought was: the machines have been busy.

  They ambushed us. They were worker-type Macros, equipped with huge pinchers. A large number of them were drilling-types as well. As soon as I saw them, I knew we’d stumbled upon some kind of resource, probably a mine. That’s why they were hard to see. They’d been in burrowed holes in the rocky bottom. Like a hundred moray eels, they popped up and attacked when we were right on top of them.

  Pinchers clanked hard on battle armor and the leading men were sucked down into holes. I knew then how it had happened. Each company had been equipped with only one hydrophone, assigned to a non-com to lug around behind the captain. If those men had been leading the company and all been pulled down into these black holes, they could have been torn apart down there in the dark before they could engage their equipment. That’s why we hadn’t heard a call for support.