by B. V. Larson
“Now, as they swing around us,” I said, almost whispering, “we’ll catch them again at close range with everything we’ve got.”
I called to every weapons mount directly, and spoke to the human gunners. I was most interested in the three heavy beamers. I’d let the enemy get in farther by not using them much until now, but at this point, at close range, they should be devastating.
“I want you to call a new target every ten seconds,” I told Sandra, who had a determined look on her face. “Target an intact cruiser, and relay it to the three beam gunners.”
“But Kyle, they can’t fire and retarget that fast.”
I shook my head. The station trembled under my feet as guns hammered us in a steady drumbeat. There was only about a minute and a half left before the enemy swept past us.
“Sandra, are you up for this?”
“Yes.”
“Listen closely then, the gunners are all going to target different ships. At this range, each heavy laser should take out a target in a few seconds, all by itself. If you call out a target every ten seconds, they’ll have thirty seconds to reload, retarget and fire.”
She nodded. “Okay. No computers to do this?”
I shook my head. “Not this time. And Welter is busy with general ops. I’m undermanned, and I need an experienced gunnery officer.”
Sandra smiled wanly. In the past, right down to the beginning of our long journey into space, she’d been a gunner for me. In some ways, she was one of the most senior veterans I had, but she hadn’t done this type of work for a long time.
“You can count on me,” she said.
I smiled, but slid my eyes to the clock. We had less than a minute before the fireworks began. Now that her duties were clear, Sandra was talking to the gunners manning each of the heavy beams directly. I felt sure she could do it—almost sure.
I turned to Marvin with special orders. “Marvin, I need you to get into full battlegear right now.”
An odd number of cameras turned toward me—a sure sign I’d surprised him. “Why Colonel?”
I tried not to feel exasperated. Somehow, this robot was worse than my human troops when it came to questioning orders and bad timing. My natural gut reaction was to bellow at him to move, but I decided to waste ten of my precious remaining seconds giving him an answer. I knew that if I didn’t he would be curious about it and distracted throughout the battle.
“I think they may still try to land troops. Their opening moves indicated that was their intention, and since they haven’t destroyed us, I think they may still try.”
“Oh,” Marvin said, considering. “That’s a very thoughtful insight. Somehow, it slipped by my mind in the excitement. I’ll prepare myself immediately.”
Marvin slithered away toward the armory. Over the preceding months, we’d done some experimental work with his structure, and come up with a modular design for combat. Marvin was different than a normal trooper, in that he was capable not just of changing suits and gear—he could reconfigure his own physical body to meet the demands of the moment. He and I had built some very nasty anti-personnel equipment in our spare time while working on the battle station itself.
I could tell, looking after him for a few long seconds, he was overjoyed to get out his battlegear. I knew his source of excitement wasn’t due to bloodlust, or the natural exhilaration of battle. He was more like a kid who finally gets to try out a new toy he’d gotten for Christmas and put away in the closet until spring.
Now that everyone was on task, I turned back to the holotank. Twenty-one seconds remained until the first of the enemy ships had circled the station to our weapons-encrusted side.
“Rear armor is down to twenty-nine percent,” Welter said.
I took in several slow deep breaths, and the clock ticked away to zero. In an instant, all hell broke loose.
Sandra had already called out her first three targets, and directed each of the heavy beams toward one of them. I realized right off that was a smart move I hadn’t told her to take. She’d primed the queue so everyone had something to shoot at and no one was left out. As soon as the beams leapt out, drawing three perfect, bright lines of destruction between the station and an enemy ship, she’d already selected and began calling out the next target for each gunner. She would keep them as busy as any computerized targeting system could possibly do.
The results of the heavy beams were spectacular. The cruisers were caught in brilliant flashes of radiation, which lanced through their hulls and out the far side in less than a second. Each burst of fire was a kill-shot, but there were so many of the enemy still to come.
The railguns began pounding out projectiles moments later. They were much harder to aim and control now. Best used against a concentrated enemy, the pellets took time to reach their targets, which were moving laterally away at high speeds. It was like firing bullets at bullets—not an easy thing to do. The vast majority of them missed as the cruisers raced by.
The enemy fired in return. Their cannons were at their best at this close range. The cruiser belly-cannons were firing high-speed projectiles similar to our own railgun batteries, but on a much smaller scale. Hitting with these weapons was dramatically easier than it was for us to hit them, because we weren’t moving. The strikes began raining down.
The enemy didn’t fire more missiles now that they were passing by so close. Missiles we could shoot down, and if they dared to explode early, they were as likely to take out one another as they were to damage us.
“Sir,” shouted Welter over the growing din of battle, “we’ve lost heavy beamer one, and the gunner in railgun battery five is not responding.”
“I think he’d dead, Kyle,” Sandra said. “That’s Lamond. You want me to go down there and see if he’s alive or needs help? If only the gunner is lost, I could take over the system and keep firing.”
“No, stay at your station. Keep calling out targets. The beamers are doing all the damage now, anyway.”
She nodded and gave her remaining two beamers new targets. After another minute, something hit near the bridge section. We were all left crouching, our hands welded to our consoles. The lights flickered and went dim. They didn’t come back on again. Only the holotank still glowed, as it was on a separate circuit.
“I can’t see my screen, Kyle, it’s out.”
“Use the holotank,” I said. “The com system is still working. Call out new targets.”
For the first time, I considered the possibility that we were going to lose this battle. It was galling, as we’d come so close. The problem was this very bridge I was serving on. It was our weak point. If the bridge was knocked out or even disconnected, the Macros should win. In most of my prior battles with the machines, human input on the command side hadn’t been so critical. After all, every unit had smart weapons that kept firing at any handy enemy target. This battle was different, due to the loss of so many experienced brainboxes. Human commanders were required to make even the most minor decisions. Without us, nothing would get done.
The lights stayed off, but the holotank stayed on. We all stared at it, not able to help ourselves. Then it died as well. Welter climbed under it, working on the guts of the machine. I figured it was hopeless, but worth the effort. When the last of the heavy beamers stopped firing, Sandra looked at me in the bluish light. The only illumination we had left came from our suit lights. I nodded to her.
“Go check on Lamond,” I said. “And good luck, love.”
“You too.”
There wasn’t any time for a kiss, and we both knew it. We were both behind visors anyway. She vanished into the hallway and I wondered if I’d ever see her again.
Welter and I were the last people on the dead bridge. The battle outside had subsided. There were still crashing sounds, thumps and shuddering, but there was much less noise than there had been.
“How many cruisers are left?” I asked.
“I don’t know, sir. My counter stopped working at nine. That was about one minu
te ago. I’m not sure if they flew past and moved out of range, or what.”
I thought about his or what. Most of the possibilities were very negative. I suspected we’d lost power on much of the station, and lost virtually all external offensive weapons. The fact the firing had died down indicated we’d either killed them all, or they’d decided to try for an invasion after all.
I called for all personnel to sound off. I listened closely after transmitting the order, and thought I heard a few burbled replies. Someone was still alive out there. But the central com system was down, and our individual transmitters couldn’t communicate through the heavy shielding around every chamber on the station. We were cut off, out of power, and probably vastly outnumbered. Even if we had wiped out all the cruisers, there was still the dreadnaught out there, and the Crustacean ships, which we hadn’t seen yet. Things looked grim.
I did a full weapons check. Welter and I couldn’t fight an army alone, but we were still two, fully-outfitted Star Force Marines. Hopefully, if the machines did board, we’d take a few of them down with us.
-8-
Standing in the dark and relative quiet of my dead bridge, I recalled reading that humans often reacted to disasters with a similar pattern of behavior. Doomed individuals caught up in a battle or a plane crash often fought on until the bitter end. In denial as to the truth of the situation, black boxes recording flight crews in their final moments rarely captured panic or despair. Instead, crews tended to work every angle they could, always planning to survive somehow, always intending to get out of their dire situation. It wasn’t until the very end that the final, undeniable shock of truth struck home: the realization that you were well and truly screwed. Welter and I had almost reached that point—but not quite.
“We’ll move through the ship to the upper battlements, picking up anyone we can to form a squad,” I said, my voice steady and strong.
Welter nodded, but said nothing. He hoisted his heavy beamer to his chest and made final adjustments to his battlesuit.
“I’m glad I insisted on everyone having heavy infantry equipment available,” I said. “I’d hoped we’d never need it—but events had gone in unforeseen directions.”
Was that a tiny snort I’d heard? I wasn’t sure, but I thought I’d heard Welter scoff into his microphone. I decided to pretend I hadn’t noticed, and ignored his poor attitude. Morale was understandably low.
The station was dark except for the brilliant, stabbing beams from our suit lights. Smoke hung in palls, and there were whistling leaks at the structural joints as air escaped out into space. We didn’t bother to repair anything, but instead marched onward, heading into the shafts and toward the upper decks.
The bombardment of the hull slowed and finally ceased. The vast hulking station became eerily quiet. I was pretty sure we hadn’t taken out every enemy ship, so that left us with only two viable possibilities: either the surviving enemy had passed us by and sailed off out of range, or they’d decided to try to invade the station and capture it after all. I considered the latter option to be far more likely.
“Keep a sharp eye, Welter. You aim your beamer left, I’ll cover right.”
“Are you kidding, Colonel?” asked Welter, breaking his silence at last.
“Kidding? I don’t often make jokes in the midst of a battle.”
“Sir, this is no longer a battle. This is a brief interlude between defeat and annihilation.”
I stopped marching and turned to him. My suit lights bathed him in a white glare. I saw his autoshades automatically darken his visor in response. Before the visor went black, I thought I saw his lips twist into a disgusted expression.
“I’m not getting your point, Commander,” I said.
Welter made a sound of exasperation. “My point? We should be planning to hide, escape, or blow up this station. Instead, you’re proceeding as if we have a chance to win this conflict.”
I turned away from him and began marching again. After a moment, he followed.
“I’m surprised at you Welter,” I said over my shoulder. “I’d never have figured you for a quitter. If you want to stand around in your suit right here, be my guest. You can shiver and sweat, or just piss yourself. Whatever seems appropriate to you. But until I’ve reconned the status of this new stage of the conflict, I’m not joining you.”
Stung by my comments, I heard Welter give a blowing sigh over his microphone. I didn’t turn around, but I knew he was still there as I could hear him stomping after me. His boots rang on the deckplates, and I was glad to hear them behind me. I didn’t relish marching through these dark, empty spaces completely alone.
At that moment, I wished First Sergeant Kwon had been at my side instead. I’d left him back at the inner planets, guiding the setup and construction of small outposts on each of our three planets. The Centaurs had cut a deal with us to give Earth the three inhabitable inner planets, each of which had warm waters and bright sunny skies. We didn’t have anything like enough personnel to populate them, of course. But I figured if I put a squad down on each world and had them build a few structures, we’d learn more about them. I’d also wanted to stake my claim, and let the other species living in this system know that humans were here to stay.
Kwon would have been nice to have along. I knew he’d never have given me defeatist talk in the face of the enemy. Welter was a better pilot, an excellent gunner and a strategic thinker, but Kwon was the man I wanted at my back when the machines were in my face. I thought about telling Welter this, but passed on the idea. I’d slapped him enough by suggesting he stand around and pee in his armor. It was time to let him show me he didn’t deserve the criticism.
Our first unexpected encounter in the passageways came when we reached the power couplings that isolated the top section of the station from the midsection. I’d been on the lookout for Marvin in this region, and at first I thought that’s who we’d run into. But although it was large, rasping and definitely made of metal, that’s where the similarities ended.
“Marvin?” Welter said over his proximity com-link.
“That’s not Marvin,” I transmitted back.
This machine didn’t fit Marvin’s MO. Instead of whipping black arms made of nanites, it had segmented silvery legs that flashed when they moved. I was reminded of a grasshopper made of welded steel.
I fired first, not waiting around to ask the invader for its hall pass. My big beamer flared, burning through the thin atmosphere in the hallway and causing our visors to darken instantly, almost to pure black. The machine twitched toward me, even as the beam played along its thorax. We seem to have caught it by surprise. It had been doing something with its head-section, which was jammed into an open panel.
A weapon of some kind on its head-section flared, returning fire, but it was already too late. It fired back, lancing out with a stitching series of pulsing beams. They scored my armor with two glancing hits, and then the machine’s core ruptured and it exploded with a puff of roiling gas.
Smoke looks different when released into a low-pressure corridor. It spreads out explosively, filling the entire area around us with a swirl of particles. The air was escaping, I realized, and already quite thin. I figured the hull-breach where this thing had broken in must not have resealed.
Welter charged forward, and burned the twitching Macro with a few short bursts at point-blank range.
“Did you get it?” I asked, chuckling.
Welter looked back at me. “I wanted to be sure. Looks like it’s a technician, sir. Looking at these tools in the head-section… It was doing something, working on our power-couplings.”
“Humph,” I said. “Maybe we should have let it keep working. Maybe it was trying to restore power.”
“Yeah, it was all a tragic misunderstanding.”
I moved forward and we checked every nearby hatchway. The technician appeared to be working alone. We were jumpy now, however, as we could no longer fool ourselves: the enemy was aboard.
“Kyle?”
I heard in my helmet. “That’s you, isn’t it?”
One irritating thing about radio communications in infantry combat situations was the lack of directional hints from people’s voices. Our big suits were powerful and tough, but they turned us into one-man vehicle-operators. It could be hard to tell which direction someone was calling to you, and when you turned your helmet this way and that, it was never as fast as simply looking over your shoulder. Still, in a situation like this, the armor was indispensable.
I finally pinpointed Sandra’s position using the display in my helmet. According to her signal, she was approaching me from the panel we’d found the technician digging into. With Welter’s help I heaved it out of the way. I ducked my head into the opening and peered inside.
Sandra crept out to greet us. She had on only a lightweight crewman’s suit, which she preferred in combat. I was glad to see her, but surprised.
“You are away from your post, mister,” I said.
She shrugged. “You assigned me to a gun, and I’m trying to get it working again. These things shut down our weapons systems—or rather killed our power. They’re all over the station, breaking the heavy power junctions. My gun quit, so I followed the leads back to here. I was going to kill it myself, but you beat me to it.”
“All right,” I said. “Where are the heavy troops, then? Have you seen what they have besides a few technicians?”
“No, nothing else. Not yet, anyway.”
I frowned inside my helmet. The situation was unusual. I didn’t understand why we weren’t under heavy assault. I’d expected two possible developments by this point: either they should have stood off with their dreadnaught and pounded our station to fragments, or they should have invaded with Macro marines and wiped us out. This injection of a few technicians to disable our weapons—it seemed too subtle for Macro tactics.