by B. V. Larson
At the idea the enemy could be advancing down the shaft to our location, the gunnery sergeant’s eyes grew comically wide. He checked his weapon again and led the team into the hole.
I followed with Kwon right on my heels. We didn’t have much in the way of light or handholds, but we only had a mile or so to go. Using the suit’s grav boots, we were able to walk on the sides of the tunnel.
It was an odd sight, looking up and all around. Marines were everywhere, walking all over the walls of the shaft. Since our boots would adhere to any surface and there wasn’t much gravity to pull us in any particular direction, I could look directly “up” from my point of view and see more marines walking on what looked like the ceiling from my position.
Behind us, a smart metal hatch closed. The shaft wasn’t pressurized like the central chamber of the ship. We were in vacuum now.
The shaft was dark except for our suit lights and the distant circle of glare from the far end ahead of us. It occurred to me that the light from outside was the light of Sol, the real sun. The star I was born under. I almost wanted to march the whole way up there just to see it.
Dead ahead, the tunnel flared up with laser fire and my visor darkened to protect my eyes.
“Weapons at the ready,” I said on company chat. “Hold your fire until you see what you’re shooting at. We have marines withdrawing toward us.”
I looked around and realized I needn’t have bothered. There wasn’t a marine there that didn’t have their projector in both hands and aimed dead ahead. Nobody had gone cowboy and begun firing into the unknown, either.
The flare of laser fire grew brighter as we marched deeper into the shaft.
“At least we know some of them are alive,” I said. “Hold your fire until we’re in close.”
A haze of smoke arose, obscuring things. We made several attempts to contact the approaching team, but they didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure why.
We came up to the edge of the smoke, and being marines, we plunged into it.
I felt my heart pound. My breath came in rhythmic bellows, blasting over the microphone in my helmet and causing a roaring feedback in my headset. This was the stuff! It had been a long while since I’d been in serious action. Hunting down cyborgs hiding in holes in the bowels of this mammoth ship was nothing compared to this. They’d never had the numbers and never had a chance. This was something entirely different.
The first thing I met was a flying marine. He was out of control, spinning into us in free-fall. I could tell he’d let go of the walls of the shaft and fired up his boots, hoping to fly the rest of the way to safety.
Unfortunately, we were in the way. He barreled into the first men in line, knocking them down like bowling pins.
“Let’s grab him, Kwon!” I shouted.
Together, we flipped our grav boots to maximum, making them plant us on the side of the shaft. Then we leaned forward, arms outstretched.
He almost took us out. Strong or not, when you’re hit by an armored body flying at over a hundred miles an hour, you’re hit pretty hard.
I stumbled and felt as if my ankles were snapping off. The servos in my armor whined in protest and the smart metal shivered. Kwon’s big hand joined the party, saving the day.
“Duck low if more of them come flying at you!” I shouted. Around me, everyone was duck-walking now into the smoke.
The marine in my arms was limp. I checked his rank and name, which was printed on his helmet and shoulders. PFC Hans Klaus. His vitals were blank—not a good sign.
“Get this man to the rear of the formation! Corpsman!”
More hands soon reached out and handed Klaus to the back of the line. I knew that with luck, he’d make it all the way back out of the shaft and be revived. Our medical was the best—and we were hard to permanently kill. Even though his lungs weren’t breathing and his heart wasn’t pumping, millions of tiny robots were working inside his body, trying to keep his cells alive.
We pressed forward, and I wondered what we’d run into next. I didn’t have long to wait.
We could hear them now. I wasn’t sure why we’d been unable to get radio before—but now we could. Their com links connected with ours automatically and the chatter came in. None of it sounded good.
“Another group on the right. Keep fire up!”
“Man down! Man down! They’ve got the corporal and they’re tearing the shit of him!”
“I’m out of juice! Can anyone give me a hook-up?”
I took a deep breath and my mouth formed into a hard line.
“Call double-time, Sergeant,” I ordered.
He glanced toward his captain, who nodded. Soon, we were trotting down the shaft. I couldn’t hear the footsteps of those around me because there was no air to carry the sound, but my boots were clanking and sparking on the melted, fused rock. The material that made up the outer shell had a lot of flint in it, causing us to leave a shower of orange sparks as we ran.
“Relief coming in on your six! Friendlies! Repeat, friendlies!”
We rushed up and joined the men on the front line—what was left of them. I went from helmet to helmet until I found the bluish glow of an officer. It was a Centaur lieutenant, and he was as banged up as the rest of them.
“Where’s Gaines?” I asked him.
His eyes were glassy, and I saw he’d lost most of his right foreleg. He still had his projector in his strange Centaur hands, however. He was breathing funny, but I wasn’t sure if that was shock or the effects of the venom the cyborgs all seemed to have.
“Gaines!” I shouted at him. “Where’s Major Gaines?”
He lifted his trigger finger and aimed it up the shaft.
Great, I thought. That’s where the cyborgs are.
“Is he dead or alive?”
The lieutenant waggled his head, a Centaur shrug, then he puked in his helmet.
“Withdraw, Lieutenant,” I told him. “You’ve done your part. You’re relieved.”
When he could manage it, he climbed onto his three remaining feet and staggered toward the rear of the line.
I frowned into the haze and laser fire up ahead. How were they getting into our suits like that? The cyborgs I’d dealt with had been mean, but easy to crush in our armor.
Again, I got the answer to my question pretty fast. The cyborgs chose that moment to charge into our line.
The smoke had been doing them a lot of good. It hadn’t occurred to me that they might be releasing it purposefully to obscure our vision. But when they showed up with pouring smoke off their bodies, I understood. This stuff wasn’t just smoke. It was some kind of artificial agent. It was manufactured particulate matter. Something like an aerogel, which we’d used in fleet battles, but never with ground forces.
When lasers went off inside the smoke, it showed its true nature. It refracted and reflected the beams making them blossom wide in a prismatic glare. The stuff turned a perfect beam of linear light into a thousand splintering rays. If I had to lay money on it, I’d bet the damned smoke stopped radio waves as well, effectively blocking our localized transmissions.
I’d been wondering how the cyborgs could penetrate armor. They did it in a way I’d never expected: they had big machetes—I guess you could call them swords. With blades two feet or so long, these weapons flashed and chopped into their victims, hacking through an inch of steel like nothing.
Those blades—I’d seen their like before. The edges were white, and shone like diamond. They were just like our combat knives, but much heavier. Each cyborg carried two of these in its forward claws, and they swung them like they knew what they were doing.
The results of all these new tactics were alarming. Their smoke obscured them as targets and shielded them from the full power of laser fire even at close range. Once they were in hand-to-hand, the cyborgs had the advantage. They were like dervishes, chopping and slashing with abandon.
“Don’t fire unless you have your weapon right up against their bodies,” I told Kwon.
/> “Why not?” he asked, letting fly with a long bolt into the face of a charging cyborg.
The beam flared outward, blinding us and doing little to the enemy other than causing it’s carapace to sizzle. The beam had no power in this smoke.
“Oh,” said Kwon.
He met the charging enemy with a sweeping foot. He performed a perfect stop-kick. I grimaced, expecting he’d lost his foot. But the cyborg went down. Perhaps it was Kwon’s unexpected size and strength. It had begun its swing a fraction of a second late, and before it could chop anything off Kwon, it was flat on its back.
Kwon pressed his projector to the cyborg’s belly and pulled the trigger. Steam shot out of it, and it stopped thrashing.
“Yeah,” he said. “That works good.”
I had two of my own to worry about. Our front line had been pretty well shredded. I didn’t think they were all dead, but they were definitely letting the enemy through. Instead of taking Kwon’s tactic, I grabbed up one of the enemy blades. Thrusting it directly ahead of me with my arm at full extension, I caught the next one in the chest. It wasn’t finished yet, so I jerked my arms and threw it into the next one that came at me while the first was still impaled on the sword.
They both went down together and marines near me shot them to death.
Kwon and I advanced. For once, my improved strength proved invaluable in battle. This was essentially a hand-to-hand fight. I wasn’t any faster than the enemy, but my armor was much thicker and I hit much harder. Also, the cyborgs seemed to lack discipline. They charged in a frenzy, reminding me of ancient warriors. They were like screaming berserkers. Once we got the hang of how to deal with them we were able to advance steadily with few losses. We formed up an organized line with the other men and moved up the shaft.
“I should issue shields and short swords,” I complained as I hacked and slashed.
Most of my men had swords now, plucked from the dying claws of the fallen. We had our guns in one hand—or in some cases just left them dangling on the ground—while we used the swords to great effect.
The cyborgs were ferocious fighters. They had no fear or pity in them. They were like rabid dogs. But the longer I fought them, I found they had a weakness: disorganization. They didn’t adapt well to our effective tactics. They just kept rushing in to die.
Eventually, there weren’t any more cyborgs. We’d advanced almost to the top at that point. I called a halt about a hundred yards short of the surface.
Around me, the men leaned on their knees and gasped for air. Nothing quite takes it out of you like prolonged hand-to-hand combat. You exert every ounce of power you have in every move, because it might well be your last. After ten minutes of that, even my men were winded.
“Take a breather,” I said. Ahead of us, the opening was a bright circle of light. The sun came into the shaft at an angle, splashing its glare on the southern wall. The round circle of sky we could see clearly now was dotted with stars.
After a ten second rest, I tapped a private’s helmet.
“Private, get up there and give me a report.”
“Me sir?”
“Dammit, that’s what I said!”
Kwon gave him a kick in the butt. That got him going. He scrambled up the final hundred steps to the top of the shaft.
“If you don’t like volunteering, don’t stand close to an officer,” I called after him.
He gave me a perfunctory salute over his shoulder and soon was silhouetted against the starry sky.
I watched as he cautiously stuck his head up there. He looked for all the world like a gopher poking its nose out of a hole.
“Well?” I roared.
“All clear, Colonel. At least, I think it is.”
“That’s good enough for me. Company, advance!”
We made it out onto the surface of Phobos. I had a good look around and was amazed at the mess. Gaines’ cameras hadn’t done justice to the scene. There were deep furrows burned in huge X patterns all over the place. Our equipment, sensors and turrets were all destroyed.
Worse was the strewn bodies of our dead. Hacked apart, our men lay scattered over the field. I walked from suit to suit, reading nameplates.
Finally, I found Gaines. He’d never even made it down into the shaft. His suit was dead, and he showed no more signs of life than it did.
I fell to my knees and smeared the ash-like dust from his faceplate. Another friend down. How many more would I have to find like this?
I started to get up and leave—but something stopped me. It was a gauntleted hand. Gaines had grabbed my ankle as I turned away. His eyes were still closed, but his hand had reached out and gripped me.
“Corpsman!” I roared. “Get the Major down the shaft. I mean NOW!”
I watched them tap nanites into his emergency ports and carry him off.
I smiled. One less dead man would haunt my dreams tonight.
-27-
About an hour later we’d managed to turn Phobos around and float back to the Tyche ring. Using the ship’s balloon-gravity weapon and some replacement turrets we’d set up on the outer hull, we were able to clean the lasers off the ring. I sent back some messenger ships after that to order the rest of the fleet to come through.
We watched nervously as they began flying into the system behind us. We had good sensory systems set up on the outer hull again, with nanite lines running down to my control center.
Really, the enclosed area under Miklos’ tent-like dome of smart metal had become Phobos’ bridge. I was back there now, watching the screens. They seemed to update more slowly than they did on a carrier, but they were working.
Contacts poured through the ring at a steady pace. As each appeared, it was yellow at first—but quickly was identified as friendly, given contact info with print too tiny to read, and changed to green.
Two carriers, with their surrounding clouds of fighters came through first. After this vanguard a swarm of gunboats followed. Then came the cruisers and more carriers. The wallowing transports brought up the rear.
Just about when they’d all made it through, and I was beginning to relax, a warning buzzer sounded. It wasn’t a scratchy, irritating sound, but all of us were attuned to it. Operators jumped and tapped at their consoles. As usual, Jasmine was the first with useful information.
“Contacts sir. Not ours.”
“How far out?”
“About an AU away. Not sure where they came from—we were clear, and now we’re not.”
“At that distance light takes a while to get across space. Maybe our new sensors didn’t pick them up until this minute. Are they lined up with the sun?”
Sometimes ships could hide in the glare of the sun. It didn’t work with optical pick-ups, but with radar and other sensory systems a ship could hide in the radiation.
“Not exactly, but they are headed toward us.”
The fleet formed up together and began heading sunward. It was really the only option as the Tyche ring was far from the inner planets of the Solar System. Even if Phobos had been able to move as fast as a fighter, it would still take us a day or two to get to Earth. Since we were crawling with no built-up inertia and not much in the way of gravity wells to pull us faster, it was going to take nearly a week.
“How long until we’re within range?”
“Hard to say, they’re maneuvering now. At current course and acceleration on both sides, we’ll take about sixteen hours to get close.”
“Can you get these ships up on the screen? Optical views, I mean?”
“Not yet, but I should be able to get contact positions and counts up right about…now.”
She worked the controls as did the other operators around her. The holotank that was suspended at about head-level above the operations table came to life. It had been dark up until now, as we hadn’t hooked it up to the new data streams coming from the hull.
I gave a slight intake of breath. It was a mistake, but I couldn’t help it. Normally, I never showed surprise aro
und my staff. They didn’t need to know when I was surprised. It was always bad for morale.
Somehow, when she’d described “incoming contacts” I’d envisioned something like a hundred ships. A number comparable to what we had ourselves.
What I saw was a mass of red contacts. There were hundreds and hundreds of tiny red dots. Each was no more than a pixel or two, floating in layered, disk-shaped formations out here. Rank after rank of them, coming toward us in waves.
When organizing ships into formations in space, there was no need to place them in lines. Lines presupposed gravity and a two dimensional area to be filled. We dealt with ships organized into planes instead. Sheets of ships were coming at us. They occupied vast regions of space and were layered one plane behind another.
“I’m still working on a count, sir,” she said. “There are so many, the front ranks are occluding the ones behind.”
“Take your time,” I said, “wouldn’t want to get an inaccurate total.”
As I stared, it became obvious the enemy could see us as well. They probably had a much better accounting of our numbers than we had of theirs. After all, this was their star system and they had had years to seed space with countless probes and spy-bots.
“How many ranks do they have?” I asked.
“Seven sir. Of that, I can be certain. Right now, I’m estimating that they have around a thousand ships per rank.”
Seven thousand ships, I thought. Holy God, how did Crow manage to build them all?
My staff was white-faced, except possibly for Sarin. I’m not sure if she was supremely confident in my power to overcome such odds, or simply too busy correlating data to worry about it. Either way, she kept moving while everyone else stood and stared, transfixed.
“That’s a surprisingly big fleet,” I commented.
“We never could have won with our original force,” Miklos said. “We probably can’t win now.”
I looked at him in annoyance. “Nonsense. Remember we came here planning to hide most of our ships behind Phobos. Now, the situation is even better. We have Phobos under our control, ready to sweep that fleet from the sky.”
