by B. V. Larson
“Can we use our fighters to support them?”
“Yes, but I calculate a high loss rate.”
I gnashed my teeth. I didn’t want to lose the fighters, nor any more marines. The fighters were primarily designed to fight in space, not for ground support. My marines should be able to do what they were destined to do.
“If three battalions of marines can’t take a beach, we’re going to lose this anyway.”
“I believe they can take it, sir. But I wanted to ask you for support. If some element of your force on the big island could cross the water and hit the enemies flank, I think we could lower our losses by seventy percent.”
“On what basis did you arrive at that calculation?”
She showed me her numbers via my computer scroll. I flattened the screen, which wanted to roll up at the corners. Even smart screens tended to curl.
“I see your point,” I said after reviewing the data. “If we come in on the eastern peninsula, they don’t have much there. We’ll be able to get our boots on the ground and advance under cover. While the enemy is busy with us, the three invading battalions can charge the front line and take the turrets out. We can even bring the fighters in when the enemy is engaged and hit them with combined arms.”
“Exactly, Colonel.”
I chewed it over unhappily. “We’ll still suffer harsh casualties,” I said, “but short of retreating I can’t see what else we can do. Those men can’t sit there at the bottom of the sea forever.”
“How long do you think it will take you to get a full battalion to the peninsula?”
I thought it over, and while I did, it occurred to me that Sarin really was running this op. It wasn’t the sort of situation I was accustomed to. Normally, my officers didn’t call the shots—not on something as big as this. But she was doing a good job, and she was in the better position to do the job. It wasn’t her fault I’d insisted on coming down here and doing the dirty work personally.
“All right,” I said at last, going over timing and readiness issues with her. “We’ll be there in about twenty hours. It will be a long night, crossing the water and all. I’ll take only our freshest troops along with a sprinkling of veterans who have experience with our newest tactics.”
Captain Sarin inquired about the tactics I was talking about, and I explained how we’d brought down so many of the machines so quickly. If she was impressed, it was hard to tell. It usually was with her. Unlike most of my troops, she didn’t express herself with vigor.
“You’re results are impressive, sir. I’ll relay these tactical refinements to the rest of the officers.”
“Fine. But I still want an experienced crew with me. I’ll take Captain Gaines’s company, for starters.”
Captain Gaines heard his name and wandered closer. “What’s up, Colonel?”
I held up my hand, shushing him.
“Very well, sir,” Captain Sarin said in my ear. “I’ve placed his company on the roster. Please move west as quickly as possible and merge with Fourth Battalion. They are full strength and positioned close to the crossing point.”
“Got it, let them know I’m coming, Riggs out.”
“Anything I should know about, sir?” Captain Gaines asked.
I grinned at him. “Yeah. You’re going to love it.”
Over the next ten minutes, I briefed the Captain, who didn’t voice any objections for once. I thought he might be in shock.
“I know your men have been through a lot, Captain,” I said. “But that’s how most marines feel the day after an invasion. Our work here isn’t through, not by any measure. Less than ten percent of the machines have been taken out—and that’s only counting the ones we can see from space.”
Nodding numbly, Captain Gaines followed me to brief the men. There were a few groans, but they gathered their kits quickly enough and we set out. We had about sixty effectives in all. I frowned at that. Hadn’t we started out with two full companies? These men had indeed gone through the ringer. I decided to split them up when we merged with Fourth Battalion. If I put a fireteam of about four men in every company in the fresh battalion, they could disseminate the tactics and lead by example—they’d also be less likely to be taken out entirely.
“We’re going to merge up with the Fourth and serve as reinforcements for them, bringing the battalion up to full strength.”
“Oh,” said Gaines, sounding disappointed but resigned. “I guess my company is finished then. I’m sorry to see my first command disintegrate.”
“What?” I asked, giving him a frown. “No, no,” I said. “They’ve taken a few losses. It just so happens they lost a Captain. I’m giving you a new company. Choose a fireteam to take with you from the old one.”
Gaines perked up. “Yes, sir!”
He trotted away, and I looked after him, smiling. Then I had to get back on the radio with Sarin. I checked, and found out Fourth Battalion hadn’t lost anyone. I ordered her to transfer a junior captain to another outfit we were leaving behind on the big island.
“I don’t care what you assign him to,” I told her. “Put him in charge of digging latrines. Think of something.”
I signed off again, muttering that I had to do everything around here. When Gaines came back, he had a hard-eyed group of killers at his back. They didn’t look like the cleanest cut team, but they looked like they could shoot.
“These men will do fine,” I told him.
By the time we reached Fourth Battalion, another hour had passed. I let the men rest while I went to talk to the Major in charge. I was surprised to see a familiar face. The commanding officer of the Fourth was none other than Major Randal Sloan. I laughed when I shook his hand.
“I get it now,” I said.
“Sir?”
“I mean I now understand why this battalion is almost entirely intact.”
Sloan’s face fell. I guess I shouldn’t have said it. Major Sloan had a reputation for self-preservation on the battlefield and in space. Somehow, he was always the first man to reach the airlock or the lifeboat when the ship was breaking up. He was a soldier, just like all my marines, but he had the survival instincts of a junkyard dog.
“Quit pouting, Sloan,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Remember, I appreciate men who can stay alive. You’ve got a knack for it, and it’s something I need today. In fact, that’s exactly why Captain Gaines is here at my side.”
I briefly explained Gaines’s rapid advancement. Gaines tried to look tough while I spoke. When I finished the introduction, Sloan shook Gaines’s hand and welcomed him aboard.
“You’ve got Alpha Company,” Sloan said, gesturing toward the beach. “They’ve recently lost their commander.”
“It will be an honor serving under you, Major,” Gaines said.
After another round of salutes, he trotted toward the beach. Behind him, his handpicked fireteam followed closely. They’d almost never spoken since we’d broken up their original company.
Sloan looked after Gaines’s crew wonderingly. “You sure can pick’em, sir.”
“Never mind that,” I said. “Are you ready to cross the water or not?”
“Negative, sir. We stopped mop-up operations as soon as we got your call, but our suits haven’t fully recharged. I would imagine that your people’s suits need an hour or two to top off as well. We can’t make the crossing with people sinking into the waves on the way.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking at my gauge. It read forty-seven percent. I hadn’t fully charged before I left, but that was still an alarming number. “We flew here to save time,” I said, “but possibly that was a mistake. These new power-suits take some getting used to.”
“The men love them—as long as they have power left in them.”
Our suits had generators, of course. All our marines carried generators and laser projectors. But the generators could not, by themselves, generate enough power to keep the suit fully operational under battle conditions. Our big, hard-hitting laser projectors suc
ked too much power. So we’d designed the suits to operate on batteries most of the time, and they automatically recharge themselves back up to full when idle. Unfortunately, that recharge period often took too long.
I called Sarin again and demanded that a power source be dropped from orbit. Ten of them, in fact, one for every company in the battalion. We had to get recharged and moving soon. The longer we delayed the assault on the target island the longer the machines had to dig in and set up an ambush.
Captain Sarin was nothing if not efficient. Within twenty minutes, she had the big generators ferried down from orbit by destroyers with black-nanite arms. They were placed in a neat row on the beach and the men rushed them the moment they were down and humming.
“They must really need a charge,” I said, watching. “You would think we’d laid out a buffet and rang the dinner bell.”
“Their suits mean life to them, sir,” Sloan said. “And power keeps the suits operating.”
A few minutes later I walked up to the nearest hulking generator. It detected me and sent a tendril of nanites threading their way across the sand to my suit. It looked as if someone had poured out a bottle of mercury—except that the liquid ran uphill.
The line of nanites met my left boot and the tickling sensation of heavy power passed through me. There was always some detectable level of bleed when you dealt with this kind of amperage.
We relaxed, ate and talked while our suits charged up. I reflected that, although it was strategic downtime, maybe it wasn’t all that bad to have suits that needed a charge. Sometimes, marines needed to recharge, too.
In less than an hour after I’d merged my company into Fourth Battalion, we were on our way across the waves. To me, this was the most fun you could have in power armor. I’d always enjoyed Jet Skis back home, and this was a close equivalent.
The huge metal toes of my boots touched a cresting wave now and again, but otherwise I stayed fairly dry. Hundreds of other marines zoomed along in loose formation all around me. Beneath us, our grav-lifters pushed at the water making it dish-outward and form small wakes. Behind us, we left a thousand white trails in the black seawater that rippled and bounced until the sea smoothed out again.
Soon, I could see Tango with my helmet set to infrared. It was a greenish zone of warmth on the near horizon. We were still in the middle of ‘second night’ on Yale, and we were using our infrared systems to see. The land was much cooler than the hot seawater, so it registered green while the ocean below my feet was a glaring white.
Beach invasions are always problematic, but natural conditions on Yale made this particular invasion worse than the norm. We would have to come in at night, flying over the water. This made us perfect targets for enemy emplacements on the target island.
Yale’s climate didn’t help. One of the biggest concerns was the behavior of the tides here. On Earth, our relatively small moon gave our oceans pretty impressive tides for its size. The difference in ocean depths on a given beach was often four feet between high and low tide.
But Yale was much more dramatic when it came to moving water around the surface than what we were accustomed to on the relatively placid oceans of old Earth. Here, there was the gas giant itself, a massive gravitation force of crushing proportions. There were a number of local moons in the planetary system as well, each exerting their own significant forces on the oceans of this world. As a result, tides were rather chaotic and could vary by as much as thirty feet in an hour. It was almost like witnessing a continuous series of rolling tidal waves.
Our power-armor would keep us from drowning, but we had to take the tidal movements into account. The islands literally lost or gained ten percent of their surface area depending on the time of day. It was safe to say that humans would never be able to swim on these dangerous beaches.
We hit the shores of Tango at low tide. The last thousand yards were a muddy slog, but I ordered my men to turn off their grav-lifters and hump it to cover. We needed to save power.
The dark beach was soon full of clanking marines. We made it about a quarter of the way to cover when something spotted us and opened fire. Streaks of incoming fire spat out, and to my surprise they weren’t lasers—they were pellets. Hard-hitting rounds of ballistic ammunition flashed out to greet us from a dozen machinegun nests on the ridge ahead.
I shouted over the command channel, giving the go-ahead to fly again. The men barely needed to hear the order. They were already lifting off in droves and zooming forward. The longer we were on this open beach, the worse it was going to be.
The streams of bullets were different than normal automatic weapon fire back on Earth. First of all, there were no tracers. I supposed the machines didn’t need to light up every fourth round with an incendiary just to see what they were aiming at. Due to my sensory gear, I could still see the incoming streaks of hot lead.
The bullets were different in other ways as well, I soon realized. They were bigger, being about the size of felt pens. About four inches long and more than half an inch thick, these rounds struck with real force.
Ten rounds hit my armor in a burst as a hosing spray swept near at chest-level. A normal man would have been cut in two.
Fortunately, my armor didn’t even rupture. But the kinetic force was such that I was tossed back and thrown onto my can. I couldn’t believe it. Nothing less than a Macro’s leg should have knocked me down in this power-suit.
“Major Sloan? Are you reading me?” I asked over the unit channel.
“Here sir.”
“We’ve got to get to those nests and take them out, now!”
“I’m well aware, Colonel. We’ve got casualties.”
I jumped up and rushed forward. I was very conscious of the fact that my chest-armor had been seriously damaged. Another hard hit like that might punch through. Even with all my modifications, I didn’t think I would survive it.
“Should we use grenade-launchers, sir?” Sloan asked.
The grenade launchers Sloan was talking about weren’t old-fashioned, under-barrel units like the American M203. When we fired a grenade, we fired a small tactical nuke at the enemy.
“The ridge is too close,” I said, “and I don’t want to expend that kind of ammo on this position. Permission denied.”
“I’m putting a sharpshooter squad on every pillbox then,” Sloan said. “Maybe we can get a lucky hit.”
“Good idea. Right now, I’m wishing we had brought along some heavy weaponry.”
“We could call for air support, sir.”
“Forget it. By the time they got down here, this will be over with and I don’t want them exposed to enemy AA until we know what we’re up against.”
“Roger that.”
Now, from our advancing lines, counter-fire was being thrown back at the enemy. As far as I could tell, this had little or no effect.
We charged onward. It seemed to take forever, but really it was probably less than a minute before the first elements of the Fourth reached the ridge. That’s when the enemy really let us have it.
Up until we got close, the enemy guns had been spraying at all of us, like someone with a broom trying to push away dust. When that didn’t work and we got in dangerously close, the automated guns changed tactics. They chose an unlucky marine at the front of the charge and hammered him until he went down. Then they kept hammering him.
I wasn’t at the very front wave, but I was within a hundred yards of the brave men who were. I watched as a dozen of them went down, being shot to death by a thousand orange sparking rounds. The men fell, struggled, fell again. There was nothing we could do for them, and their suits kept them alive for several ghastly seconds.
Even after they’d stopped moving, the streams of bullets poured into dead marines. The beach ran red and flesh flew after the shell-like armor was finally breached. When the guns were satisfied, they traversed their turrets to the next victim.
Then, at last, we reached the ridgeline. It’s hard to describe how you feel at a mo
ment like this, when you finally get to sate your urge for revenge on your tormentors. I guess attackers who’ve suffered losses and abuse during a long charge have felt the emotion since time immemorial.
We roared and strained, grappling the machines, burning them. They weren’t easy to take out. Guns operated by humans were relatively simple to destroy—the key was that the human soldiers firing the guns were softer than the guns themselves. But in this case, there were no soldiers. Just the heartless guns, chattering away relentlessly. We had to destroy them in detail, ripping barrels from tripods, stripping away snaking belts of ammo and burning smoking holes into their CPUs.
Finally, it was over. While the Fourth spread out on the ridge, seeking cover and checking on the wounded, I went to find Major Sloan.
He was just coming up from the beach when I met him on the ridge. I gave him a single raised eyebrow. He was practically the last man to reach the ridgeline.
“I was with one of the sharpshooter teams, sir,” he reported. “Negligible effects.”
“I noticed. How many casualties?”
“Fourteen dead, six wounded.”
An alarming statistic. Normally, my men were very hard to kill. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have two hundred wounded and no deaths after a hard fight, due to our individual survivability.
I frowned. “I guess the enemy tactics of overkill worked for them in this instance. The machines didn’t stop us, but they made us bleed.”
“Agreed,” Sloan said. “Your orders, sir?”
“Request rescue for the wounded. The rest will pack up and advance.”
Sloan looked westward at the dark hills. Ahead of us a series of ridges loomed, separated by flat, rocky terrain.
“There could be a large number of ambushes ahead, sir,” Sloan said. “Maybe we should scout first.”
“Excellent idea, Major!” I said.
I walked forward and clamped my arm around his shoulders. His helmet swiveled to regard me. I couldn’t see his expression through the dark plexiglass, but I could bet it wasn’t a happy one.