Battle Station sf-5

by B. V. Larson

  “I have installed the patches. I must warn you, however-”

  “I know, no guarantees. Take us out, Marvin.”

  The tank didn’t have an idling engine. Being powered by fusion which converted its output to electricity, it was hard to tell when it was running and when it wasn’t. Marvin simply applied the throttle and the machine whirled around, spinning the tank’s treads in opposite directions. The treads clanked and spit dusty soil everywhere. The machine turned around faster than I’d thought possible. It gave me a sickening feeling.

  “Whoa, robot!” Sloan said, grabbing the cannon controls for support.

  We hadn’t bothered to put in handholds and the like. This tank was bare-bones.

  “Yes, take turns a little slower if we aren’t in a combat situation, Marvin,” I urged him.

  Marvin made no apologies. Possibly, he hadn’t even heard us. Every one of his cameras was focused on a screen or a scope. We clanked forward with gripping acceleration. I was thrown back against the generator compartment, and was glad for my thick armor. Being in the improvised commander’s perch, I had nothing to hold onto. I looked around and finally reached up my hands to grip the wheel that opened the top hatch. By positioning my hands on either side of the wheel and lacing my fingers around it, I was able to get a good hold that wouldn’t make it spin open. I was already making design changes in my mind. I kept telling myself I should be happy the thing ran at all.

  We were slowed by the soap-bubble effect of the force-dome when we made contact with it. Passing through to the far side was a disturbing experience, as always. The tickling inside my guts was even more bizarre than what I felt when going through a ring. Somehow, you could feel that tickling energy crawl over your body. After a moment, the sensation of resistance faded and we were through.

  Outside in the open, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was surprised anyway. The Blue was gone. There was no dark, smoky form hovering over us. There was no gloom and swirling dust. Instead, we sat in blazing daylight under a blue sky. The pit we sat in was still cast in deep shadow by the surrounding cliffs of slag. The spiraling roadway cut into the walls of the pit made me think of a giant stairway up to the heavens.

  “Where did that smoke-thing go?” Kwon asked.

  “I’ve got no clue,” I said.

  Marvin rolled the tank around the floor of the pit. We clanked and clattered as we circled the dome, eyeing our surroundings. Kwon and Sloan swiveled their turrets suspiciously, targeting every fluttering bit of debris.

  “Take us up that ramp a ways, Marvin. But keep the speed under control, please.”

  We lurched toward the ramp and I was thrown back at an angle when the tank began to climb. Gravel crunched and ground into the treads, sticking in the gaps. Rocks were crushed to dust by our weight.

  “Let’s call home,” I said. “We need back up. This seems too easy, but if the enemy is going to give us this base, we’re going to take it.”

  That was as far as I got with my boastful statements. We were about half-way up the ramp to the first stair when the Macro machines finally appeared. They scuttled forward and gazed down at us from every stair, all the way up to the top. There were thousands of them. Like players at a sporting match in a grand arena, we were surrounded by uncounted masses.

  Like so many times in the past, the Macros dashed my dreams with their true plans. I had to give it to them. This time, they’d really let me get my hopes up.

  “Open fire!” I shouted, but I needn’t have bothered. Kwon and Sloan were targeting nearby machines and melting them. The power of the beams was impressive. Even when the flashing beams reached me indirectly through tiny slits, they made my visor flash and darken.

  “Turn around, Marvin!” I ordered. “Head back for the dome.”

  Marvin slewed us around in a wild one-eighty that left me with my right leg hanging over Kwon’s shoulder. I could only imagine how my marines were doing down below us in the belly of the tank. Probably, they were cursing my name and the day they’d broken their mammas’ hearts and signed with Star Force.

  Kwon brushed my foot off his shoulder and kept firing. Most of the machines were armed with long pinchers, saw-blades or scoops. These were the Macro equivalent of farm implements in the hands of angry peasants. Some had lasers, however. They fired storms of bolts down on my tank and the sound inside the vehicle was like that of a hard rain mixed with that of sizzling bacon. I knew the sizzling sound was formed by melted steel, which no doubt had formed hot runnels on the outer hull.

  The front of the vehicle had the thickest armor, like any tank. Unfortunately, now that we were running, they were hitting my tank in the butt. Still, I’d made sure to put plenty of steel in every direction. Even the flank armor was thick and solid, but it would only take so much. Eventually, they would burn through if they kept pounding us-and Macros were never likely to vary a tactic that had even the slightest hope of success.

  I gauged our chances when we hit the open floor of the pit with a bucking heave. Already, Marvin was struggling with the controls. I wished fervently that I’d put that armor skirt over the treads. The treads had taken hits along the way, and the right side seemed to be dragging. Soon, we might be immobilized. At that point, we’d be toast.

  Outside, thousands of machines rushed us eagerly. They made a rustling sound I could hear through the walls of the tank. Like scuttling insects, they charged forward, anxious to stop us or die.

  “Keep firing on the ones that are burning us. I think this tank can handle the pinchers and the like.”

  “The ones with the guns are hard to see, sir,” Kwon said.

  “What? Why?”

  “The worker Macros are all over the barrel of my cannon.”

  I took a look outside, and saw he was right. They had mounded over us now. It was like a swarm of ants on top of a big beetle. They were riding the tank in a mass. We were still crawling forward, but slowing down.

  The road became bumpier, and I quickly realized why. We were overrunning the smaller machines. I wondered how long my tank could keep plowing them over, crushing down their thrashing metal bodies before it ground to a halt. At that point, I knew we were dead men.

  “Marvin, get us back under that dome! And connect me with Miklos!”

  “Miklos here, sir,” came the Captain’s calm, familiar voice.

  I had a hard time hearing him over the din of the scrabbling, clacking Macro workers that now blotted out our view of the sky with their bodies.

  “Miklos, listen to me. I need a low-powered laser burn from a single destroyer.”

  “Where sir?”

  “Right here. Follow my signal down, and burn me at this location.”

  “I don’t-I don’t understand, sir.”

  “Just do it man, or we’re dead! Keep the power low, and unfocus the guns, I want an area about fifty feet in diameter to be hit. Give it a five second burn, immediately!”

  “Yes sir,” Miklos said after another brief pause.

  I could hear a familiar tone in his voice. He thought I was crazy. But I also heard something else: resignation. All my officers had learned to do crazy things after spending enough time under my command. If you lived long enough on my team, you were sure to be given insane orders at some point.

  The first sign I had that the beams were hitting us was the dimming of my visor. I didn’t detect the laser itself, as most of the power was not in the visible spectrum. But it did come down unerringly to burn my tank. It was almost impossible for them to miss as I was providing them with a radio signal to sight on.

  The scrabbling noises on the hull intensified.

  “Increase power!” I shouted. “Miklos, double down on that burn, same duration and area, but more power.”

  My visor blackened out entirely. I wasn’t sure for a moment if the Macros had covered us entirely, blotting out the light, or if the lasers from the destroyer had done it. I reasoned it had to be the destroyer, as I would have been able to see the suit light
s of my fellow marines otherwise.

  “Colonel Riggs, we are close to the edge of the dome,” Marvin said.

  This entire time, he’d been piloting the tank without wavering from his post. That was one good thing about having a robot for a pilot: they didn’t panic on you.

  The scrabbling on the roof of the tank subsided. I figured the Macros were melting to slag out there. We were still bumping and heaving as we slowly traveled over their countless bodies, however.

  “Miklos!” I shouted. “Can you still hear me?”

  There was a quiet second or two. I was worried, as I knew once we entered the dome all communications would be cut out. Another possible disaster included the high probability that our com system had been damaged by the bombardment.

  “…Riggs…contact…”

  “Miklos, listen to me: I want you to send down everything we have. I need ground, air and space support. Kill these machines and meet me inside the dome. This is our new base. Bring the Centaurs. Bring everyone.”

  There was only some buzzing in response. “Marvin, send my last message again and again. Keep sending it until we are inside the dome.”

  “Transmission sent.”

  “Good. Now send it again.”

  I was rewarded with a single, curious camera eye. “Transmission sent,” he said.

  I snorted. Even the robot thought I was crazy. But didn’t care. It was beginning to look like we were going to live to a see another day.

  — 18

  We hit the dome going too fast. It was an easy mistake to make, but Marvin almost killed us. I was gripping the wheel of the upper hatch with only one gauntlet at that moment, having let go with the other hand to tap Kwon’s shoulder. I shouldn’t have bothered, as he couldn’t feel me through the armor even if I slapped him hard.

  In any case, when we hit the Macro dome, some law of physics was violated. We were moving too fast, and it was like hitting a concrete wall instead of a soap bubble. Everyone was thrown forward. For the four of us in the upper compartment, with no straps, nano-arms or other restraints, it was a worst case scenario. Marvin was at the bottom of the heap, crushed down on the control bars. I was second, entangled with Sloan who ended up with his helmet shoved under my armpit. Last came Kwon, crashing into the stack like a sledgehammer. He had held on a fraction of a second longer than the rest of us, which only served to put him on top of the sandwich.

  My neck and right arm were twisted and my visor was starred again. My suit nanites had barely affected repairs since the lashing of the Blue’s dust storm, and now they had new hairline cracks to deal with. Fortunately, I’d designed the suits for absorbing impact. As bad as this pile-up was, it was nothing compared to a collision in space. We simply weren’t moving fast enough to cause serious damage.

  I heard a whuffing sound. Kwon was laughing his ass off. “This is pretty comfy,” he said. “You guys are like a pile of cushions.”

  “Get your fat butt off my neck,” Sloan complained.

  “We are proceeding into the Macro dome,” Marvin said. “It would be advisable to return to your stations, sirs.”

  Grunting and straining, we untangled ourselves. Soon afterward, the exterior sounds of thrashing Macros vanished entirely. Judging by the instant silence that fell over the tank, I knew we had made it back under the protection of the dome.

  “We’re inside, Colonel Riggs,” Marvin said.

  “Kwon? How many of the enemy do we have on the hull?”

  “I’m not sure,” Kwon said, swiveling his turret.

  “They might be too close to see, but I’m not-wait a minute,” Sloan said.

  He fired, but something went wrong. Instead of an intense light, a gush of heat and fumes from the chemical laser backwashed into the tank. Fortunately, we were in our suits or we would have been in trouble.

  “Looks like my vents are clogged,” he said.

  “Cease firing. We have to flush out the blockage. Everyone, keep your suits on.” I didn’t think any of them were dumb enough to open their helmets, but I gave the order as a precaution.

  “I see one now,” Kwon said. “They are coming through dome, sir.”

  I opened a channel to the marines in the troop pod. “Marines, I want you to get out there and clear the hull of this tank. Engage anything coming through the dome. We’ll provided supporting fire from here when you clear our vents.”

  Kwon slid away from his turret and cranked open the top hatch.

  “Where do you think you’re going, First Sergeant?” I demanded.

  “With the men, sir. Could you man my turret?”

  I heard the marines moving out below. The back ramp dropped with a crash and heavy boots pounded. There were flashes and snapping sounds almost immediately, as the marines engaged the enemy.

  “Hold on a second,” I told Kwon. The tank was nearly finished as a mobile platform, but I wanted it farther from the edge of the dome. “Marvin, take us closer to the factory. Move slowly.”

  The big gears ground and clattered. The tank was moving again, but I could tell the treads on the right side were failing. Marvin fought the controls, as the levers were only power-assisted. They gave a lot of feedback, I hadn’t had time to design anything more sophisticated. Macro design was basic and over-built. It reminded me of old-fashion Soviet designs. When in doubt about stresses and tolerances, Macros just carpeted an extra layer of steel over everything.

  The big machine made it almost to the factory when I called for it to halt. All this time, Kwon had been manning his turret, but when we finally halted he scrambled for the hatch again. I knew he couldn’t wait to get outside and smoke a few of those machines personally.

  “All right,” I said. “Sloan, you man your turret. Marvin, you man Kwon’s. Kwon and I are going outside.”

  Everyone looked happy with these assignments, especially Sloan. I could tell by his wide-open eyes he’d been worried I would take him outside with the machines. I almost chuckled-maybe he was the smartest one of the bunch.

  We didn’t get far before we were caught up in the firefight outside. Kwon threw open the top hatch, and used his repellers to fly straight upward. He was firing at something on the ground, I could tell that. I climbed out after him and took a leap to the ground. My rifle was in my hand and I had the trigger depressed before Kwon came down again.

  “Take cover, First Sergeant!” I ordered. “Stop showboating up there.”

  “Sorry sir,” Kwon said, letting himself drift down beside the tipping tank.

  After a flashing firefight, my marines managed to drive back the ten or so Macro workers with lasers who’d followed us under the dome. The rest really didn’t have a chance. Without ranged weapons, they snipped at the air a few times with what looked like hedge-trimmers then went down in a storm of heavy laser fire. These new projectors were very effective. A one-second burst focused carefully on the thorax was enough to disable a worker.

  There was a lull in the fighting after we’d killed all those we could see. My men stayed in whatever cover they could find, which consisted mostly of our tank’s battered hull and the indentation made by the treads. I threw myself down on my belly in a dished out section of earth and checked my weapon for damage. I had still had a ninety-percent charge and there was no sign the unit was going to overheat soon.

  Kwon fell into the pit beside me, his heavy body tossing up a shower of dust. “The tank has taken quite a beating,” he said.

  I followed his gaze. In spots, the tank’s two-foot thick armor was down to less than a foot of crispy, pitted metal. Much of the melting effect appeared to have come from directly above-which I assumed had been done by my own ships. They’d fried the Macros on our hull as I’d asked, but had almost overdone it and fried us as well. I had no doubt this was why the tank’s vents were clogged. They’d probably melted and fused together. I was surprised the two cannons operated at all.

  Looking around the scene, I saw a trail of twisted metal wreckage that led from the tank to the e
dge of the dome. We’d been dragging them and crushing them down into the earth with every foot of progress.

  “Why have they stopped coming, Colonel?” Kwon asked me.

  “They haven’t,” I said. “Macros don’t just quit, not unless they are calling off the attack completely. I don’t buy that. Not yet.”

  “Maybe our troops have come down outside, and are engaging them.”

  I would have liked to talk to Miklos and find out just how close that was to happening, but I didn’t buy that argument either. I shook my head. “I don’t think so. It’s too soon for that. It will take a few hours for Miklos to get ground support down here.”

  Kwon looked at me. “I see,” he said. “So we are on our own?”

  “For now.”

  Kwon looked back toward the perimeter. “Where are they? What the hell are they doing out there?”

  “They are probably massing up just outside the dome. They’ll come inside all at once and try to overrun us.”

  “Ah,” Kwon said. He grunted as he climbed to his feet. “In that case, we have a few minutes. What are your orders?”

  I looked up at him, and stood up beside him. Kwon was so quick to accept my theories as facts. I wished I had a thousand more like him-but then, that might not have been healthy when I turned out to be wrong.

  “Let’s dig in,” I said. “Set up trenches around the tank.”

  Kwon brought a gauntlet to his helmet. “What if they come in under us, sir? Remember South America?”

  “But they can’t…” I began, but then I trailed off. I nodded. “Right. They could be digging outside, coming in through the dome underground, then pressing ahead into the middle of this region. In fact, for all we know, there are tunnels under us right now.”

  We didn’t have a surviving sensor box that could measure activity under our feet. I felt trapped. If we dug in, they might get in close and tear into our lines. If we stood on top of our single tank, we would be easy targets if they simply walked through the dome.