by B. V. Larson
“It is? Um…sorry.”
“But I’ll do it anyway.”
“Good!” I said, riding a wave of relief. I felt as if I’d just taken two flying bullets and slammed them into one another, canceling the momentum of both. It was the perfect judo-move, a deft stroke of the sort I’d rarely managed when dealing with women.
Naturally, I had no idea at the time what the repercussions would be.
-14-
The flight out to the Thor system quickly became more urgent. Just as we left Eden-8, we got a new communique from Captain Sarin, who was still at her post in the Thor system.
The ring on the seabed had become active again, but this time, instead of sucking out the moon’s vast oceans, it was allowing things to crawl through onto the ocean floor. These things were unmistakable, as we’d seen them time and again: they were Macros—the big models.
Also, unlike most of the Macros we’d seen recently, these units had shields. I recalled that back on Earth, when we’d first battled them, the biggest machines had been large enough and had generators powerful enough to project their own bubble-like domes of force. That had been the reason for the development of my marines in the first place. We’d needed to get under those shields and shoot up into the bellies of these hundred-foot tall metal monsters.
Now, it was happening all over again, to another unsuspecting world. The machines were marching, masses of them. Like a long line of army ants they came up from the seafloor and strode out onto the newly revealed, salt-crusted lands.
“We’re going to have to gather the fleet again,” I told Sandra as I dressed and prepared to go to the bridge. “We’ll pull everything together into one single fist this time. With Miklos’ new carriers, we’ll have a stronger force than we’ve ever had.”
“Why go out there at all?” Sandra asked me. “Why not retreat to hide behind our battle station? If the Macros come, let them. The Crustaceans don’t want to join us anyway. Let them deal with it.”
“You’re a cold woman, Sandra.”
“That’s not what you said last night.”
I chuckled and shook my head. “They’ve just lost hundreds of billions of lives. That represents a vast loss of sentient biotic beings. Whether these Crustaceans agree to cooperate or not, I consider them to be my natural allies. Every one of them that dies weakens our side.”
“So we’re going to protect them?”
“We’re going to try.”
When we arrived on the bridge, my command staff was already in emergency mode. Marvin had remained out at Thor with Jasmine’s fleet. I summoned him online to grill him. I wanted to know how the Yale ring had been reactivated.
“Marvin, you told me you’d shut off the ring,” I said.
“Not exactly, sir. I said that it appeared I had shut off the ring. The truth is not yet known.”
I rolled my eyes. Marvin never took the blame for anything. Somehow, when the crap really hit the fan, it was always some other guy’s fault.
“If you didn’t really shut it off, why did it stop sucking out the ocean?” I asked. “And more importantly, why is it allowing troops through into Yale’s ocean now?”
“There are two possibilities that have risen to the top of my stack of logical deductions.”
“Name one.”
“Possibly, I did shut down the ring. However, the Macros have turned it back on again and purposefully reversed the flow of the ring. In this hypothetical scenario, they are now using it to transport their ground troops directly to the planet.”
“What’s the other?”
“When I turned off the ring, it is possible I didn’t actually turn it off. Recall that the command I sent was a random hit. It is well within the domain of probability that what I actually did was reverse the direction of the ring’s flow. In this scenario, the ring was never actually disabled.”
I nodded slowly. He was right. One of those two possibilities had to be it. Really, it didn’t matter much which one had occurred. What mattered now was that Yale was under attack. They had a full-scale ground invasion going on down there.
I frowned at the onscreen maps. “We’ll have to deal with the machines directly. We can bombard them from orbit, but they’re notoriously hard to kill. Those shielded behemoths are only going to die one way. We’ve got to get down there, land ground forces and get in close.”
“That’s very hazardous duty, sir,” Marvin pointed out.
“Don’t you think I know that?” I snapped. I knew I was being irritable, but I felt I had a right to be. This wasn’t going as planned. Nothing was.
I contacted Miklos and gave him grim orders: “Call up the transports,” I said. “I want an emergency muster. I want ten thousand marines in space within twenty-four hours.”
“Yes sir—I’ll try, sir.”
Over the next day, Miklos came pretty close. I had my ten thousand troops thirty hours later. That man knew how to get people moving. About half of the marines were human while the rest were Centaur volunteers.
Instead of assembling an organized fleet at Welter Station and sailing out as a tight group as I’d planned, we scrambled and put up everything we could. I left only Miklos’ carrier and two dozen gunboats behind to defend Eden in case Earth attacked us.
I didn’t like leaving Eden relatively undefended, but I figured the odds of a sucker-punch coming from Earth were low right now. Emperor Crow had just sent us an envoy, after all, and technically we were still in the midst of peace negotiations. As far as I could tell, Earth had no way of knowing what our fleet movements were, and they didn’t have much of a fleet of their own left to hit us with after the Macros had plowed into the Solar System last year.
Most importantly, it just wouldn’t be like Crow to risk losing his last ships in a bid to knock me out. He’d always been the type to build up quietly; massing forces until he felt victory was assured before he moved. In a way, he reminded me of the Macros, but with less guts even than they had. At least when they made a play, they didn’t try to beg and plead their way out of it when things went badly. They just lost their fleets and built new ones.
Crow was more like a Mongol leader in that he stayed well behind the front lines and would run if it looked like he was going to lose. Unfortunately, his tactics were as effective as they were dishonorable.
My ships reached and passed Welter Station on the dawn of the third day. It took two more long days to reach Yale. By that time, Captain Sarin had managed to knock out about a dozen of the big machines, mostly by continuously bombarding them from space. Our gunboats had a long range and powerful punch. She’d kept them firing down into Yale’s atmosphere, sending a steady stream of blue balls of light from orbit to the surface. Single railgun salvos weren’t enough to break the machines directly, especially not the ones that stayed under the cover of the ocean. But once they dared to march up on the land and establish a beachhead, they were pounded with withering fire. The gunboats, all concentrating on a single target, could bring a machine down after an hour or so of steady fire. The trick was to hit a given machine several times within the span of a few seconds. When we managed to do that, the shields didn’t have time to regenerate and the machine was overwhelmed and destroyed.
It seemed to me, looking at the raw data, that these crawling machines had tougher shields than the ones that had invaded Earth so long ago, but they were also slower-moving.
Captain Sarin sent us hourly reports. At first, our strategy was working. She picked a target, had every gunboat aim at it, and after a while it died. But the machines were still making headway.
They’d set up a few underwater domes and were beginning to churn out workers. I had to wonder what the hell their long-term plan was. Right now, they seemed content to colonize Yale while under continuous fire. Maybe they figured they could just ignore us and keep building. The idea was galling.
By the time we were a day out from planetfall at Yale, Sarin had given up on bombarding them in the shallow ocean near the ring. She waited until the
y surfaced and raced for rocky cover. Then, like a thousand BB guns popping away at sea turtles in unison, the gunboats began their relentless bombardment.
There were two problems with our strategy that I could see: One, the machines kept coming. They seemed to be limitless, while our salvos of railgun ammo were dwindling. Within a few days, our stocks would be depleted. Two, the Macros were clearly becoming harder to kill. They were redesigning themselves with thicker shields—it had to be that. Looking back through the vids and reports, I determined that it now took nearly ten hits to bring one down and had taken only three at the start of the invasion. I was alarmed, and so was Sarin. Our shooting-gallery battle had turning into a nightmarish grind.
Sarin requested permission to commit her fighters, and I denied that request. She then asked to employ her missiles—and I denied that too. The inhabitants of Yale had suffered badly enough. I couldn’t in good conscious begin blasting and irradiating their wounded planet with thermonuclear blasts.
When we were less than six hours from joining her forces in orbit, Sarin called to make her final plea.
“Colonel,” she said, “I can no longer hold them back. They’ve taken eleven islands near the underwater ring. They are setting up factories under heavy domes, two of them at the bottom of the ocean nearby. Railgun fire cannot possibly penetrate those domes. Already, smaller worker units are flowing from the domes to gather materials. According to my projections, Yale will be overrun within weeks.”
I thought about her transmission carefully before replying.
“Captain Sarin,” I said while gazing sternly into the vid pickup, “I understand your situation. Relief is on the way. I have reviewed your requests for tactical changes to our response operation, and again I’m rejecting them. All my prior decisions stand. You’re not to use thermonuclear weapons, nor employ your fighters. We’re holding those assets in reserve for now. The only thing I want you to send down into that atmosphere are conventional bombardment strikes: laser emissions and railgun salvos. Riggs out.”
I paused with my hand hovering over the cut-off button. I’d frozen her image on the screen while I made my reply. I stared at her dark, olive-shaped eyes. I’d always had a soft-spot for Captain Sarin, everyone knew that. She had to be freaking out. This was her first Fleet task force, and it looked like she was failing in her mission. The planet she’d been assigned to protect was being overrun.
“Jasmine,” I said, lowering my voice and putting some humanity into it. “I’ll be there soon with heavy reinforcements. You’ve done well with what you had. You’ve slowed the enemy advance as much as you could. Don’t worry, the Marines will handle this invasion when we get there. We’ve done it before.”
With this addendum, I signed off and transmitted the message. She didn’t send me a reply.
We arrived a few hours later and parked in orbit over Yale, joining Jasmine’s forces. Altogether, we formed an impressive fleet. I transferred my staff over to Gatre, and relieved Jasmine’s command staff. Her people were competent, but slightly less experienced than mine. More importantly, they’d been sweating it out here for days and could use the break.
Jasmine didn’t take these changes personally. She wasn’t like most of my senior staff: she didn’t have a big ego. She wanted to do her job as well as humanly possible. That was about it. I’d always found her quiet competence refreshing.
Within an hour after arriving, I was standing on the roomy but stark command deck of Gatre. The ship was equipped with a small holotank to display the local situation in three dimensions. There was also a large planning table. It was easier to manipulate, especially when discussing ground ops, which were pretty much two-dimensional affairs.
“How do you like your new ship, Captain Sarin?” I asked.
“Love it, sir,” she said. “But I’ve yet to see my fighters do anything.”
I nodded, twisting my lips. “You’ll get the chance, don’t worry. They’re designed to operate under atmospheric operations as well as in space. We’ll need air cover when we drop our marines. Let’s plan that part of the operation now.”
She worked the table’s controls with deft strokes of her fingers. The image changed and blurred for a second, then came into focus. The islands around the ring at the bottom of the sea were stained red.
I frowned at the table. “They’ve taken them all? Every island in the archipelago?”
“Yes sir. I’m afraid so.”
I looked up at Captain Sarin. Had there been a hint of bitterness in her voice? I couldn’t quite tell. Unlike Sandra, you didn’t always know what Jasmine was thinking. She kept staring at the map, making adjustments. She didn’t look me in the eye. Finally, I turned my attention back to the islands.
“We have to get down there—right now,” I said. “You’ll operate as my exec. I want you to stay up here even after we’ve set up a beachhead. If things go badly on the ground, take over.”
She finally looked up at me. “You’re going down there? Personally?”
“Of course. You didn’t think I’d dump ten thousand troops on a new world and hide in the sky, did you?”
Her lips twitched upward, a hint of a smile. She shook her head very slightly. “I suppose I shouldn’t have thought that. Sandra won’t be happy.”
I frowned at her comment. “Fortunately, she’s not in charge of this fleet.”
Jasmine studied the table. She zoomed in on the largest of the eleven islands. She tapped on a mountaintop which instantly grew large and craggy. The table displayed an angled view, canted about thirty degrees to the north. The mountains were rugged and barren. Every rock was encrusted by coral-like growths and lime deposits.
“I’ve been examining possible drop-points,” she said. “I’d recommend this one.”
“That looks pretty rough,” I said. “I’ll have trouble setting up any kind of base there.
Jasmine nodded. “Exactly. That’s why there are no machines at this location. At least, none of the big ones. There are a few workers tearing minerals from the cliffs.”
I understood her reasoning immediately. When establishing a beachhead, it was best to land without being pelted by defensive fire. The mountain was steep and unfriendly-looking, but it would afford us higher firing positions and would allow us to land our initial deployment battalions with minimal losses. Still, I was unconvinced.
“What else have you got?”
She paged to a new spot. This one was underwater off a wide, rocky beach. There were no pretty sand beaches on these new islands. They hadn’t had time to form yet.
“You could come down under the cover of water, here,” she said. “This island is small and relatively undefended. There are no enemy factories here, so the machines seemed to have given it a lower priority.”
I massaged my chin and stared. Really, neither of these drop sites appealed to me. But with only a few enemy-infested islands to choose from, we didn’t have a lot of options. This wasn’t like Earth, where you could always land farther away and advance on foot to your destination. There was very little land to fight over. And I didn’t want to get into a deep undersea battle if I could help it. I’d done that before, and it had been a grim experience.
“All right,” I said at last. “I’m going to take these two locations and hit them immediately.”
Captain Sarin looked up at me with wide eyes. I could tell I’d surprised her. She looked pleased and alarmed at the same time.
“I imagine there are other locations to choose from, if you went over every island carefully.”
I nodded. “Probably. But we don’t have another day to screw around. The Macros are growing stronger every hour, sinking their teeth into this world. We’re not gaining in strength, in fact we’re losing in relative terms. So, I’m going to trust your judgment. As far as I’m concerned, these are the best spots to land.”
She nodded and began working on the details of the plan. I saw battalions appear on the map as if they’d been dropped. Our Marine bat
talions had a fighting strength of about a thousand men each, broken into ten companies. She grouped them on both landing zones, placing three battalions underwater and the rest on the mountainous island. The three on the ocean floor were arranged in a crescent near the beach they were assigned to invade.
I tapped at the three battalions she’d placed in the water.
“These will have to wait,” I said. “Prep the land drop first. I’ve got something planned for these oceans before we put a single boot into them.”
“Something planned?”
“Yeah. Where’s Marvin?”
The robot showed up a few minutes later, looking excited. “You requested my presence, Colonel Riggs?”
“Yes, I ordered you to come up here, Marvin. I want you to link up with that ring in the seabed again. I want you to reverse your prior command sequence.”
Captain Sarin and Marvin both stared at me. When he’d first slithered up, most of his cameras had been trained on the tactical displays. Now there were too many cameras on me to easily count them.
“Let me verify that command,” Marvin said. “You want me to reset the ring—to cause it to empty the oceans of Yale again? I was under the impression we’d taken great steps to stop that process.”
“Yes,” I said. “But now I want you to turn that ring into a giant sucking hole.”
I looked down at the display, and zoomed in on the dark central circle of water the islands surrounded. “If we can, we’re going to flush every machine that hasn’t made it out of the water yet back to wherever they came from.”
The glare coming up from the screen under-lit my face. I knew I was smiling broadly, and my teeth were probably shining with bluish light.
But I didn’t care if I looked half-mad to my staff. I was really looking forward to this little surprise. The machines were going to regret crawling onto this world—if they were capable of regretting anything.
-15-
Our drop-troop technology had improved over the years. Our first efforts had been makeshift at best. I recalled loading up marines into steel boxes resembling railroad cars and carrying them with the cargo arm on my Nano ship. We’d later advanced to small one-man flying disks we called “skateboards”.
