by B. V. Larson
The flashes began out over the eastern horizon. They were pretty at first, flaring greenish-white through our blacked-out visors. Fantastic power was being released out there. I didn’t have a tactical table handy to figure out how many we’d stopped, or how many were still coming.
I couldn’t see the fighters, they were too high up. Hanging in the upper atmosphere, I knew they were stabbing down at the surviving missiles with hot invisible beams of light, but I couldn’t see any of that, either.
In the last seconds, I did see contrails. I knew that was a very bad sign. Incoming trails could only mean one thing: some of the enemy missiles had made it through.
A moment later, the impacts began. They were nuclear. There were no mushroom clouds yet, those would rise up later. In the first moments after a nuclear explosion, there’s nothing but a blooming sphere of heat, light and a sound that’s beyond all sounds.
These effects combined into what we call a shockwave, one of which rolled over my unnamed firebase.
Because my visor was the weakest part of my armor, I’d rolled over and hugged the dirt facedown. When the shockwave hit, it felt as if something huge had jumped on my back, and I lost consciousness.
-18-
I was still breathing. At first, I wasn’t entirely sure about that, but after a few hitching gasps, I knew it was true. I was still alive—for now.
Groaning, I tried to roll over. It didn’t happen. My suit seemed to be dead. I wasn’t sure what was wrong, but it felt like about two thousand pounds of dead weight.
I realized I was having trouble breathing. The air mix in my suit—I looked for the readouts, but of course there was nothing. The HUD was dark.
My first thought was that the generator on my back had gone out. Possibly, it had been damaged by whatever had landed on my back. I struggled to get up.
I’m a powerful man. Quite possibly, I’m the most powerful man physically that’s ever lived. I’ve undergone treatments that the rest of my men hadn’t. Microbial baths had been piled atop of the changes the nanites had made, and had scarred my guts and muscles until they couldn’t be toughened or improved any further.
My conclusion was that I should have been able to move in my power-suit, even if it had gone dead. Like power steering in a car, a man could still wrestle with the wheel even if the hydraulics failed.
I strained and grunted, and I felt myself shift, but not by much. I couldn’t get a breath—that was the problem. I was suffocating, and the suit that was supposed to protect me was now killing me.
I fought to think clearly. Everything hurt, my head was buzzing, and thinking was harder than it should be. Oxygen deprivation, that had to be a factor.
A growing certainty came over me: I was going to die right here, face down in this dusty hole. I wondered if I’d rate a tombstone on this spot someday. I thought about what the inscription might say: Here lies Colonel Kyle Riggs of the infamous Riggs’ Pigs. He dug his own grave, laid down in it, and buried himself for the convenience of the machines.
Angrily, I thrashed about, trying to move my limbs in any possible direction. There did seem to be some lateral range of movement to my left arm. I could swing my gauntlet back and forth, working the elbow joint.
I found also that I was able to turn my head. Getting an idea, I turned my head to the left, pushed away my fist as far as it would go, then smashed it into my faceplate.
I did it with a little too much force, as it turned out. My nose was pulped. But the visor did break, and dusty, smoke-laden air rolled in. It wasn’t good air, but there was some oxygen in it. I coughed and wheezed. After a few seconds, I felt better.
Star Force marines are tougher than normal humans. We’d been toughened further over the years. I recalled reading that the aboriginal peoples of the past were much hardier folk than soft, modern humans who sat all day at their computer stations. We marines had changed all that. We were the ones in the record books now.
I breathed in dusty, radioactive soot and I did so greedily. My lungs burned, as the air was hot. I had to guess the ambient temperature was around one hundred fifty degrees
Fahrenheit. It was hot enough to kill a normal man, but for someone who’d once rebuilt himself to go down into the atmosphere of a gas giant, it wasn’t all that bad.
Feeling stronger, I heaved. The thing on my back shifted and swayed. I knew now that it wasn’t a ton of earth or a huge rock. I couldn’t be buried if I was getting air in through my visor.
Roaring and straining, I managed to get to my knees. Finally, the fantastic weight on my back rolled away. Then I saw what had pinned me down: it was Kwon.
I checked his suit, and it was dead as well. I punched out his visor and reached inside. Blood trickled from his face.
For a few long seconds, I figured he was gone. I’ve known Kwon for years, and there’d never been a more faithful, loyal person in my life. I didn’t want to lose him.
I should have gotten up and called for a corpsman, but I didn’t. I knew I had better things to do. I had an army to look after, and a war to fight. But instead, I spent the next few precious minutes trying to save Kwon.
He’d been without oxygen for a considerable length of time. Normally, four minutes resulted in brain-death for a human being. But in the case of a Star Force marine, that could be extended considerably.
Even after our bodies shut down, the nanites in us didn’t. They had programs to maintain, and could even keep blood trickling when the heart stopped pumping. In emergencies, they could go to the lungs, gather oxygen and distribute it to critical centers of the body. These extreme measures wouldn’t keep you alive forever, but they might double the time a man had before suffocating.
After working on him with a first aid kit and a fresh nanite medical injection over the heart, I was able to get a pulse. He didn’t wake up, but he was alive.
I slumped back in my incredibly heavy suit, gasping for air myself. A figure appeared at the top of my dusty hole and looked down at me.
“You’re alive, Colonel?” asked Captain Gaines.
“It would appear so,” I mumbled.
“Here’s some water.”
He handed down a bottle and I sucked on it, spat out a gray mass, and sucked on it some more.
“You survived again, Gaines,” I said when some of the dust had been cleared from my throat.
“Yes sir.”
“If you get off this rock in one piece, I’m going to make you a Major.”
“I’m going to remember that, sir.”
Just about then, Kwon sneezed. It was a big sneeze, the kind only a big man can make. A fine wet mist rose up from his smashed visor. The mist was part blood and part snot. I grimaced. He reminded me of a whale, clearing its blowhole.
“You awake, Kwon?”
“No sir,” he said. “I’m still dreaming.”
I nodded. I knew exactly how he felt.
“Colonel,” Gaines said, “with your permission, I’m going to check on the rest of my company.”
“Do it. I’ll join you soon. Are communications up with Fleet?”
“Negative sir, the blast that hit us was laced with an EMP. I think that’s what killed our suit functions.”
I nodded. “Bastard machines. They know how to hurt us. Let me know when you have communications up again.”
“Will do, sir,” he said, then he trudged away.
“I can feel the radiation,” Kwon complained. He had yet to move. He just laid there on his back like beached whale. “I hate that feeling. It makes my teeth ache.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I recall reading about the Russian troops who were tasked with cleaning up the mess after the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded. They called them human robots.”
Kwon’s face stirred and his eyes looked at me. He hadn’t bothered to sit up yet.
“Didn’t they have real robots?” he asked.
“Yeah, they had some. But it was 1986, and they didn’t have good ones. Strangely, delicate electronics
are more vulnerable to radiation than biological systems—such as humans. The real robots all broke down.”
“What happened to the men?” Kwon asked. I could see the whites of his eyes in his helmet. He stared up at me, looking at me from an odd angle. I figured this was easier for him than turning his head.
“Most of them lived, surprisingly. They had lots of problems, of course. And they tasted metal in their mouths for the rest of their lives.”
“Yeah, I think I’ve got that right now.”
I nodded. “Can you get up yet?”
“No sir. That’s going to take a while.”
I knelt and frowned down at him. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m pretty sure my neck is broken. I’m paralyzed. Sorry about that, Colonel.”
“It’s all right.”
Over the next half-hour, we were in emergency recovery-mode. No follow-up assaults came from the seas or the Macros that we knew were crawling all over the other islands in the region. I prepared to inject Kwon with a pasty mixture of nanites and microbial “sauce”, a medical concoction we used for serious injuries. The package said “bone injury” on the side, so I hoped it could handle cracked vertebrae. I was more worried about his spinal cord damage, but couldn’t find anything that referenced that.
The needle on the syringe was about six inches long and as thick around as a ballpoint pen. Kwon looked at it, his eyes rolling in concern.
“I’m not going to feel that, right?” he said hopefully. “I mean, I can’t feel my arms or legs.”
“Sure,” I lied, and jabbed him in the neck with the needle. The bulb at the end of the syringe was smart metal. It sensed it was go-time and started pumping beige fluids into his flesh.
Kwon squinched up his eyes and made a hissing sound. “I hate needles.”
I patted his helmet and pulled the dripping needle out of his neck. “You’ll be fine in an hour.”
I left him there, flat on his back in the foxhole. I figured it was the safest spot available at the moment.
Next, I sought Captain Gaines. He’d been taking in reports and we went over some numbers together, which we reported back up to Captain Sarin. She was in a better position to see the entire battlefield situation, so I put her in charge of ops—with guiding suggestions from me.
“We lost about eleven hundred men due to missile strikes,” she said. “Added to those lost in the initial drop and various mishaps, such as the mining machine, that totals up to about fifteen percent of your total force, Colonel.”
“Not bad,” I announced, “not bad at all.”
I looked around and was mildly surprised when I realized my command staff didn’t share my enthusiasm. They weren’t wreathed in smiles. They obviously didn’t agree with my assessment. I tried not to notice their sour moods, but after a few seconds, I grew angry with them.
“Did you people come here not expecting to take serious losses?” I demanded. “We just hot-dropped on an uncharted planet. That takes huge balls, and so far, I figure we’ve been lucky.”
Captain Gaines lifted his hand. “I didn’t expect heavy losses so early, sir.”
I glared around at the rest. Majors and captains shifted uncomfortably. Some appeared about to speak up, but thought the better of it and remained silent.
“Some of you might be under the impression we dropped too close to the enemy lines. But we had no choice. We’re less than ten miles from the enemy concentrations because we couldn’t drop at a safer distance. These islands are the only scraps of available land.”
“But so many lost…” Captain Gaines began.
“Back in World War Two,” I said, interrupting him, “the Americans lost twenty four hundred marines on Omaha Beach in a few hours. During the invasion of Okinawa, over a hundred and fifty thousand died on both sides. The lesson here is that beachheads are often hard to establish. Quit whining.”
No one was actually whining, but they still managed to look glum. I turned away from them and continued planning the next stage of the assault. I gathered a few nearby officers and connected the rest up via their HUDs. Captain Sarin was there in a virtual sense, as were a number of others.
“Now, it’s time to bring down the second wave. I want those three battalions water-dropped off the beach, here,” I said, working a thin, flexible computer screen that looked pretty much like a piece of shelving paper. The sheet was impregnated with photo-reactive nanites that knew their jobs well. Activated by my touch, they collected data from networks that reached all the way up to the ships in orbit.
“So soon, sir?” Captain Gaines asked.
I glanced at him in surprise. He was a junior officer in the extreme, having been a lieutenant earlier in the day. I was somewhat taken aback to be second-guessed by a man who barely deserved to be this meeting.
“Yes. Why not?”
“They just hit us hard. They’re probably preparing their follow-up. If we land in the middle of a second missile barrage, we’ll take high losses again.”
“Presumption, Captain,” I said. “Incorrect assessment. The enemy is well-known to me. In their mechanical brains, they marked that last attack down as a failure. They expended a great deal of missiles hoping to take us out early. They lost a lot of ordnance and only killed fifteen percent of our overall ground force. To them, that’s a failure.”
Gaines shrugged. “So why not do it again?”
“Because they don’t like to repeat the same mistake twice in a row. They’ll adjust their plans and do something else. That’s pretty typical for the machines. They like to hit hard, but they don’t hit hard the same way unless it worked the first time.”
Gaines nodded. “If you say so, sir.”
I stared at him flatly for a second. “I just did say it. What we need to do now is get all our forces down out of space onto the ground, where they can do some good.”
Gaines raised his hand again. I felt a surge of irritation, but suppressed it. Due to the virtual conference setup, most of the staffers were listening in. They were staying quiet, while this man was interrupting my presentation of the plan with regularity. I could tell he was green and had been fooled by the fact only a few of us were standing here in the dirt together. He was behaving as if it was just he and I on a hill, having a chat.
Reluctantly, I recognized Gaines with a nod.
“I’m assuming we’ll now focus on digging in and preparing for their next assault, right Colonel?” he asked.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “We’re going to attack. That’s how we’ll cover the water-drop and make sure they make it up onto the beaches, by giving the Macros something else to think about.”
Gaines’s mouth was open, but there wasn’t any sound coming out. I kind of liked him that way. For the first time, I saw a new look in his eyes. It wasn’t fear exactly…I would describe it as extreme alarm.
“Are we ready for that, sir?” he asked finally.
“No, of course not. Most military commanders never feel they’re entirely ready to attack. But we’re going to do it anyway. It will throw the enemy off, and grab the initiative. If they’re worried about us coming at them, they can’t plot our deaths so easily.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, sir.”
I’d had enough by now. “Look, Gaines, I’ve cut you some slack because you’re new to operational command. Let me put it to you this way: should I be losing confidence in you? Do you feel unfit for the duties assigned?”
“No sir,” he said quickly.
“All right, then shut the hell up. We’re all Star Force Marines, and you have the particular misfortune of being directly associated with Riggs’ Pigs, meaning whatever unit I’m marching with. My Pigs, whoever they are, aren’t known for crouching in holes on mountaintops waiting for enemy assaults. You can read the wiki on that one.”
Gaines just nodded. I figured he was going to keep quiet for a while, so I turned my attention to the rest. “I want to hear any other objections the rest of you are bottli
ng up. I want to hear them right now.”
Perhaps it was my tone of voice, which was gruff and angry, but no one spoke up.
I showed them their positions, gave them an hour to get their men back on their feet, and broke up the meeting.
A minute or two later my com light was blinking. It was Jasmine Sarin.
“Yes, Captain. What is it?”
“Sir, I wanted to discuss the battle plans with you.”
“I just finished rolling up the damned map. Did you think of something else?”
“Well, no sir…I wanted to give you my input concerning the morale of the staff. It’s low, sir.”
“Yeah. People are always deflated when their team loses one. I’m trying to give them a win now, so they can feel good about themselves again. That’s what I am, you know, a glorified grief counselor.”
She was quiet for a moment. I could tell she didn’t like my sarcasm. Suddenly, I felt a touch of remorse. I liked Jasmine, and I didn’t want her to doubt me.
“Is something wrong, sir?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, sighing. I checked to make sure the channel was a private one. I didn’t want to accidentally broadcast even a single second of self-doubt.
“Just between you and me,” I began, “Every time I have dealings with the Thor system—with the Lobsters—I end up feeling like I’ve been duped somehow. I’ve felt like a puppet since we came out here. At this moment the Crustaceans are hiding in their underwater holes, and by some voodoo they’ve gotten us to fight battles for them. They didn’t even give us a guarantee of an alliance when this is all over.”
“These people have suffered grievous losses,” she said.
“Yeah. That’s about the only thing that allows me to tolerate them.”
“You’ve allowed them to get away with this, because you want them to join us so badly. Perhaps you could contact them and demand commitment.”
“I’ve thought about that, but rejected the idea. I’ll do it after I show them some victories. They won’t respect anything less. That’s a big part of my frustration. So far, we’re not looking like big winners on Yale. That means we have no leverage with the Crustaceans.”
