by B. V. Larson
After we broke off the conversation, I returned to the foxhole with Kwon. I sagged down into it and slumped back to rest. My helmet had repaired itself and was functioning normally, and I was able to set an alarm to wake me up ten minutes before go-time. Soon, Kwon and I were both snoring.
-19-
When my alarm went off, it was a gentle, beeping sound. This soon rose and rose to a shriek. I woke up, slapping at my helmet. This did nothing of course, as the controls were all inside the helmet.
The suit detected that my eyes were open, however, and canceled the alarm. Sourly, I struggled to my feet. I almost fell over Kwon as I checked on him. It was funny how tired a good bombing could make a man once you were used to them. When I got into battle-mode, I tended to shut down for sleep whenever there was a lull in the fighting.
Kwon’s eyes snapped open as I regarded him.
“You’re ugly,” he said.
I snorted. “Same to you, big man. Are you okay? Can you move, First Sergeant?”
Experimentally, he rocked his head from side to side.
“Feels a little crunchy—in my neck area.”
“Yeah. That’s the dead microbials. They’ll drain out of you over the next few days.”
Kwon heaved, and managed to sit up. I reached out a hand, but he pushed me away. “No sir,” he said, “let me do it.”
He climbed to his feet and swayed.
“How old are you Kwon?” I asked him.
“I don’t know sir,” he said. “I mean—I’m not sure right now. I guess I’m about thirty. Haven’t thought about that in a long time. Dates don’t mean much when the sun is crazy in the sky. Sometimes, there’s no sun at all.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. We’ve been on so many worlds, I don’t think about little stuff like birthdays anymore. But I think I’m forty.”
“We should throw you a birthday party. I’ll find some black candles somewhere.”
I laughed. I clapped him on the back and he winced.
“Sorry,” I said. “Still tender back there?”
“I’ll be fine.”
I knew Kwon was worried he’d be left out of the action to come if I thought he was too injured to fight. He obviously was, but I knew he hated to miss a fight against the machines. I figured it would probably be another hour or two before we made contact with the enemy. That was plenty of time for a nanotized marine with a fresh batch of juice in his blood to recover. Hell, an hour ago he’d been crippled.
“Okay then,” I said. “Let’s march.”
Kwon put on his best show, beating his gauntlets together and bellowing for people to move. I could hear a twinge of pain and weakness in his voice, but I doubted anyone else caught it. Even while half-dead, Kwon was more of a marine than most of them.
Our battalion gathered itself and moved in loosely grouped companies downslope. The machines were concentrated around the beaches in most cases. There were no domed factories on this big island, but then there weren’t as many machines per square mile as there were on the other scraps of land. That was one of the reasons I’d landed here.
“Okay,” I said over command chat, “you all know the plan. Move in battalion-strength groups down from the mountains to the nearest beach and begin to sweep. Destroy every gathering machine you find. We’ll clear this island quickly, then identify our next objective.”
I hadn’t let my staff in on it yet, but if this mop-up patrol went well, I planned to cross the sea to the nearest island with a macro factory on it. With luck, we’d capture it. In that case we could subjugate the factory and command it to output the supplies we needed. Without luck, it would be destroyed by our assault or self-destruct. Whatever happened, the invaders would be significantly weakened. At least, that was the plan.
Lightning attacks. Shock the enemy lines and dig deeply into them before they could react fully. No matter what, keep moving. That was my plan and I was sticking to it.
Within an hour my battalion, under-strength as it was, had destroyed hundreds of gathering machines. These resembled metal grasshoppers about the size of a luxury sedan. They were easy to kill as long as they didn’t mass up or arm themselves. The ones we found went down fast to laser fire and we continued on.
On the beach, we met up with a dredger. It was my first, and it was big. It rolled up out of the water to greet us. I was reminded of old, Japanese monster movies I’d seen as a kid. The thing was impossibly large.
Flashing metal cylinders with grinding teeth rose up, dripping seawater. These resembled the blades of lawnmowers. It came toward us and I knew a moment of concern. Those blades could slice through rock and sand with ease. Surely, they could sever a man in half, power-suit or no.
Fortunately, the giant was slow and relatively easy to disable. The control cables were exposed and we burned them away at every opportunity. About when it reached the sandy beach, it collapsed with a tremendous howl of twisting metal. It thrashed for a while until it gave up and died.
Some of my men cheered and stood on the big blades. I didn’t join them.
“Good job, marines. Let’s keep marching.”
Darkness finally fell over the world about an hour later. It was what we would soon come to call “second night” on Yale. The moon had two kinds of night: the first type occurred when the spinning planet turned away from the sun. That was a natural enough pattern. The rotation period of the world was about ninety hours long, so it took quite a while for a full day-night cycle to occur.
Rotation didn’t cause the only kind of nightfall, however. What we experienced was the other kind of night, which happened when Yale passed into the shadow of the gas giant it orbited. These “second nights” were shorter and occurred more abruptly. Really, it wasn’t night at all, it was an extended eclipse. From the surface of Yale, however, it was hard to tell the difference. Other than the fact that darkness came within a ten-minute span, once you were in the gas giant’s shadow the sky was as black as it had ever been back on Earth.
I’m not sure if the machines had waited for second night to hit us or not. Maybe, they’d calculated that we would be disoriented by the sudden shift from light to dark, or that we’d have trouble seeing in the starlight. Fully equipped, a Star Force marine had no such difficulties. Our visors compensated for any level of light, whether it was bright or dark.
Whatever their reasons were, they hit us about eighteen minutes after darkness had enclosed my men in its chilling shroud. I’d almost realized my goal of securing this entire island. In about an hour, I’d planned to announce the island was clear and that it was time to glide our power-suited butts a few miles over the waves to the next one in the chain. They didn’t let me have that much time.
We were marching on the shoreline, making good time, when the attack began. It started with a rush of missiles. It was a light barrage, really, and localized on my battalion. Fortunately, we had eyes in the sky. Sarin’s ships were able to give us nearly three minutes warning.
“Colonel,” Captain Sarin said, “I’m registering a large concentration of machines off the coast, coming in your direction.”
“Big or small?” I demanded, halting my march.
Kwon stopped beside me. A dozen marines streamed past, weapons in hand. They were chatting and oblivious.
“Big ones,” she said. “Big enough to have shields, anyway.”
“Thank you Captain,” I said, switching to the battalion-level channel. “Stop the chatter, please. This is Colonel Riggs. I want everyone in this unit to take cover and—”
That was as far as I got. When the first machine rolled up out of the sea, I thought to myself that Sarin had cut it rather finely. We barely had time to react before it charged us.
Fortunately, the water slowed the machine just as it would a charging man. The dome of force that covered its back shimmered where it touched the waves, releasing little bright flashes of discharged power.
The command channel became a cacophony of sound as people sounded the alarm. I
switched to company level and heard the newly-minted Captain Gaines giving his unit orders. They were good ones, so I kept my mouth shut.
“We have to get under that shield as fast as possible,” he said. “Hold your fire until you get inside that dome, you’ll just be wasting energy. Ignore Riggs’ order to take cover. Fly out there and attack it.”
I nodded inside my helmet. He was making the right move. I’d thought we were going to have more time, but they were on us already. I’d have to ask Jasmine about that later. Maybe Fleet’s sensors needed some calibration.
Behind the first machine, another dozen of monsters were surfacing now. Gaines’s company took flight as a group and charged out over the water. Kwon and I went with them, in the middle of the pack. Our foot-wide steel boots skimmed the waves.
Maybe the machine deduced our intentions, or maybe not. In any case, it slowed and backpedaled, bringing its big beams down to bear. Twin lasers lanced out. Independently targeted, the heavy beams cut down two charging marines in about a second. Then the projectors swiveled, locked, and fired again.
I was flying with the rest of the company. We were charging at full speed until the last moment, then slowing to allow entry. We had to slip under the shields at a walking pace.
We had to get in close, under that machine, under its dome. Once inside, the shield dome would protect us, not the Macro itself. Being cut down by one machine was bad enough, but if all of them could fire at us at once, we’d be shredded in minutes. The dome would prevent the Macro’s fellows from helping out.
We pressed close and no one else died before we pressed into the shield dome and forced our way inside. Macro shields were triggered by energy emissions and by any physical mass moving at high velocity. A laser beam or a bullet couldn’t push through, but a marching man could. This weakness in their design was precisely why we’d invented the marine force in the first place.
Once inside the Macro’s dome, of course, it wasn’t any kind of picnic. There were thrashing legs a hundred feet high, moving with violent speed and unstoppable power. It was like dodging massive, sweeping tree trunks made of steel. These Macros, like their brothers I’d fought so long ago, had anti-personnel turrets underneath. They were independently operated by the machine and stitched us with laser fire.
Fortunately, our armor came into play here. The enemy showered us with glittering sparks of light, but every hit wasn’t deadly. The power-armor was gouged and scored when struck, but didn’t rupture unless a single target was hit with a steady pounding for several seconds. Similarly, our weaponry was superior to what it had been in the old days. A single marine was able to destroy an anti-personnel turret with less than a focused second of beam-time.
The turrets popped like light bulbs. In less than a minute, we’d destroyed them all and only lost three more men, two of them having been knocked flat by the thrashing legs. I figured we could probably revive them—if we had time.
Next, we cut down its legs and burned our way into the CPU. Ten seconds later the machine sagged down in death, and the company cheered.
I wasn’t happy, however.
“Gaines,” I said, “you still here?”
“Yes sir!” he shouted back, obviously overjoyed to have survived in my presence for nearly a full day in a warzone.
“Congratulations,” I said. “Good work on the Macro, too. But I want to change-up our tactics for the next one.”
Already, we were coasting toward the next Macro in line. This one was behaving the way the last one did, backing up like an elephant being charged by metal mice.
“Why?” Gaines asked. “That was a textbook kill, sir.”
I rolled my eyes briefly, and urged myself to be patient.
“I know,” I said. “I wrote the textbook. Check your power gauge, Gaines.”
“Ah, sixty-four percent.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We just expended about ten percent of our charge killing a single machine. Have you counted how many machines we have to kill?”
Gaines paused. “We’re going to run out of power before we get through them all. Power or manpower.”
“Exactly. The trouble is, our method works, but it takes too long. We’re forced to use the grav-lifters to keep these heavy suits above the water surface, and the whole maneuver is taking too much power.”
“Point squad has reached the next hostile. What are you orders, Colonel?”
“Tell them to ignore the anti-personnel turrets and the legs. Just burn through to the CPUs and kill it as fast as you can.”
“It will go crazy, sir. We’re supposed to just take all the incoming fire?”
“Relay the order or I’m hitting the override.”
Gaines did as I told him. The marines were stunned. They’d all practiced our classic-kill approach to this kind of enemy before, and they’d just seen it work as advertised. Changing it up didn’t make much sense to them. But they were marines, and marines followed orders and got the job done.
The next machine went down in half the time it took to knock out the first one, and we only lost a single man. His power-suit sank to the bottom of the sea and laid there, inert and spread-eagle.
“Kwon, I’m getting life readings from that fallen marine. Go get him and drag him back to the beach. Stay on the bottom so that the enemy machines can’t target you.”
“Aw, sir…I’m fine to fight.”
“You have your orders First Sergeant!”
“Yes, Colonel!”
Kwon dove away from me toward the sandy bottom. I felt better now that he was out of the battle. He’d been reacting slowly for the last several minutes. It was only a matter of time until one of the machines caught him, and then it would take more than an injection of nanites to put him together again.
By this time, my company had destroyed three of the machines. We only had three full platoons left, so I made another refinement to our tactics.
“We’re going to spilt up on these next targets. We’re running into each other as it is, and the machines are going to get smart soon and change their own tactics or retreat. I want to take them all out. One platoon each will attack the three closest machines.”
Not even Gaines objected. The next kills went faster than before. We were down to thirty percent power, but we were getting the moves down. As far as I knew, Kwon and I were the only ones out of the entire company who’d ever had the pleasure of fighting under the legs of a steel behemoth. I knew the improvement wasn’t due only to my improved tactics, it was also the men themselves. They were learning fast.
The next machine went down, and then another. I was breathing hard and sweat poured down my back. Seawater had gotten into my left boot somehow, and was sloshing all the way up to my hip joint. I suspected I had a burn-through there as my left thigh was numb. I was trying to ignore it, even though the added weight was making my entire left side sag and list as I cruised over the waves.
I checked my gauge as the Macro did its death-roll. We hadn’t lost a single man. Seventeen percent left in the juice-box.
“Marines,” I said over company chat, “I want you to know I’m proud of you all this day. None I’ve served with could do better. After these next few fights, we’re going to start running out of power. If you get down to five percent, I want you to let yourself sink to the bottom, then escape by walking in any direction you can. You’re generators will recharge your armor in time, if you don’t push it—”
“Sir?” Gaines spoke up, interrupting me.
“What is it now, Captain?”
“Sir? All the machines appear to have been knocked out.”
I looked around, swiveling my helmet and scanning the night. The inky black ocean was empty. A few steaming wrecks bubbled here and there, emitting internal light as they arced and sizzled. But there were no Macros left standing.
“Oh,” I said, and then laughed. “I guess I’m surprised we’re still alive. Hah! Well done, marines!”
They cheered tiredly. I cheered too, and k
ept laughing. A few of them had the energy and the spirit left to laugh with me.
-20-
We charged up, then swept the big island clean over the following five hours. The machines were still out there, I knew, making their plans. But they didn’t have any ships to cover them. Their forces were made up purely of walking units and missiles. We had the high ground of space, and I kept the gunships firing down into the atmosphere, working to pin down their roaming concentrations of big machines.
During the night hours, the railgun salvos showering Yale were more visible. The white streaks rolled down, taking several seconds to go from a tiny pinpoint of light to a brilliant flash as they struck home. It looked as if the world were being hammered by an endless series of slow-motion meteors.
I knew the Macros would come again if we didn’t hit them first. They’d never be content to let us share ground so close to them. But that could wait until another day because I had my beachhead, and I was happy.
The next island target was one of the smallest in the archipelago that surrounded the undersea ring. Shortly after my group had cleared the seas near the big island of attacking machines, three battalions splashed down in the shallow seas off the smaller island, which I’d named “Tango”. It was shaped like a “T” and my battalions had landed just above the top crossbar on the map. Following their orders, they assembled underwater then advanced on the shoreline.
The first reports I received concerning the assault weren’t positive.
“Colonel Riggs?” Captain Sarin asked, hitting my helmet with a private channel.
I stopped going over casualty reports and vids of our assaults on the big machines to take the call.
“Go ahead, Captain.”
“The beach assault is meeting stiff resistance. The machines were forewarned by your attack, I believe.”
“What kind of resistance?”
“Gun emplacements and a series of ridges lined with smaller machines. I’ve ordered the marines to retreat into the water where the laser turrets can’t hit them.”