by B. V. Larson
“I’ve got just the man for the job,” I said, giving him a little shake.
“Are you sending me on point, sir? I’m a major.”
I laughed. “No. I’m just screwing with you, Sloan. I can’t afford to lose my unit commander. I’m sending Captain Gaines and his team of toughs.”
“An excellent suggestion, Colonel,” Sloan said, brightening. He trotted away to relay the order.
A few minutes later, Captain Gaines showed up and asked to speak with me. I waved him to sit down. I was crouching with my back rubbing against a ferro-crete pillbox wall. I had a nanite sprayer out, which was working on repairing my armor with repeated light coats. I’d found that if you sprayed a thin coat several times on the damaged area, they seemed to work faster.
“Colonel, have you got a problem with me?” Captain Gaines asked.
I looked up at him.
“I do now,” I said.
“What do you mean, sir?”
“I like you Gaines. I have you down in my private book as an up-and-comer. But this is a bad moment in your personnel records as far as I’m concerned.”
Gaines shuffled uncertainly in his armor. Finally, he threw up his hands. “I just don’t get it, sir. First, you praise me and put me in charge of a company. Then you give me a series of hazardous duties, the latest of which seems to be tailor-made to get me killed.”
I shook my head and stood up. On my chest, a mass of nanites bubbled and worked to patch up my suit. It was sort of like watching acid eat at something—but in reverse.
“Captain, I’m going to give you a pass on this one, because you and I haven’t been in close contact before. Here’s the deal: I need officers who can do anything and everything I ask them to. I’m asking you to do one of a nasty mission right now. Are you requesting another assignment?”
“So, this is all some kind of test?”
“Not exactly. It is a test, but it’s also an opportunity. You can’t prove what you’re capable of if I don’t give you the chance to do so. Right here, right now, I’m giving you that chance.”
“I see.”
“I’ll ask again, do you want another assignment?”
Captain Gaines hesitated. Then he straightened his spine.
“No sir,” he said. “I’m taking this mission, and I’m going to complete it successfully.”
“Excellent! I knew I could count on you.”
He turned and trotted away to gather his hand-picked group of hard-eyed vets. I’d done a little checking up on Captain Gaines during my brief downtime before we’d crossed the sea from Big Island to Tango. He had a checkered past. He was one of those Star Force types that had joined us to get away from troubles back home. He’d been a gangster and had a rap sheet as long as my arm. But Star Force had given him a second chance, and the structure he seemed to need. I felt he’d excelled under my command. Now, it was time to see what he was really made of.
As he led his group of scouts off into the darkness, I sincerely hoped I’d see him again.
-21-
The first report back from Captain Gaines and his recon group came in less than an hour after we’d reached the beach. I’d decided not to sit around and was making headway up to Tango’s ridges. We were moving slowly, expecting an ambush at every twist in the land.
I felt we could afford the time. The three battalions at the bottom of the sea offshore weren’t drowning yet; they had another forty hours of air and supplies. Major Sloan and I decided they would do best by staying in position. If they could hit the island defenders from the front, while we were rolling up their flanks, we could destroy them in detail. Their trap would become our trap.
All these fancy ideas faded when Gaines called in and made his report.
“Colonel Riggs, we have problems,” he said.
“I can see by your locator you’re pretty far up the ridge, Gaines. Are you under fire?”
“No, sir. That’s the problem. I’m going from gun nest to gun nest. They’re all empty. The enemy has clearly been repositioning.”
I cursed quietly. “Where the hell are they?”
“Unknown, sir. They have plenty of those automated gun turrets, wherever they are. We’ve counted twenty-two empty gun sites.”
I was stunned. “You ran into twenty-two gun emplacements just while climbing the next ridge of the island? How many do they have at their stronghold?”
“I’m not sure they have a stronghold, sir.”
“Trust me, they do. Their tactics are clear. They saw us hitting their flank and reacted by sending out worker machines to withdraw their defensive systems from this side of the island. That means they’re building up a concentration, probably at the center of the T.”
“That makes sense, Colonel, but I can’t confirm any of it. I haven’t met up with a single active defensive system yet.”
“All right, keep going until you do. Riggs out.”
I turned to the mass of men trudging up the hillside all around me. “Sloan!” I roared. “Get them moving. There’s nothing to stop us for the next few miles. Let’s pick up the pace.”
Shouted orders rippled through the units. Soon, every knee joint was whining and rasping as armored legs moved faster. We stopped crawling over the land looking for an ambush at every turn and began trotting.
The power-suit batteries were in pretty good shape at this point. We’d designed the generators to be able to keep up with a light drain and still retain a full charge. A man could trot along for hours in them and never move the needle on his battery levels. But firing his weapon or flying would begin the inevitable drain.
Along the way uphill, I contacted the commanders of the battalions that were still sitting off the coast. I ordered them to ready themselves to advance onto the shores. Sloan trotted up next to me as I made these arrangements.
“I’ve done a little math, sir,” he said. “The Macros are very predictable, even for machines.”
“Tell me what you’ve figured out, Major,” I said encouragingly. Sloan was naturally laid-back—some may even say a lazy officer. But when he felt his safety and the safety of his unit was in question, he suddenly turned on the steam. He became a much more efficient officer in dangerous situations, which was partly why I kept placing him in harm’s way.
“They like to use predictable patterns for the spread of their resources, especially when they don’t have any critical basis on which to make their placement decisions. Basically, if they had ten square miles to cover and ten guns, they would place one on each square mile.”
I nodded. “So, you’re saying they probably covered the island with defensive systems evenly, up until now. When they realized they were under threat from two fronts, and their systems as placed weren’t enough to stop us, they rewrote their algorithm.”
“Exactly, sir. They’ll cluster them up on the top of the highest point, making it harder to take the entire island.”
“We pretty much knew that, Sloan.”
“Yes sir, but I’ve figured out how many weapons they have, based on the number found and the number of square miles covered.”
“Ah, okay,” I said, getting where he was going with this. “That’s good thinking, and might even be accurate. What did you come up with?”
“Two hundred and ninety guns, sir. That’s only if they withdrew all the guns from all three legs of the island.”
“Two hundred and ninety,” I said, thinking about it. I didn’t like the image that number conjured in my mind. It was grim, in fact. They would tear up my men.
“The number of guns a force faces does not cause a precisely incremental number of casualties to the attacking side,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. There are plenty of factors, like the shock of the strikes on the men. They’ll tend to advance more slowly while their comrades are falling. Also, they’ll be able to concentrate fire and take people down much faster with so many guns.”
“Ten guns would be nothing. We’d take th
em easily. But two or three hundred—that kind of force could stop our attack cold.”
“The enemy will rip us a new one. That’s my conclusion.”
I glanced at him suspiciously. Sloan was not known for his self-sacrificing nature. “I guess you’re about to request we drop a nuke on the center of the island.”
“I thought about that, but I think it would fail. The enemy is sure to have enough AA to stop a small barrage of missiles. We’d have to abandon the island and pound the place from orbit, expending a large amount of our stockpiles.”
“What is your recommendation in this case?” I asked, honestly curious about what he’d come up with.
“We should call in the fighters, sir. We haven’t seen any systems with good AA capability yet. These ballistic guns are good against troops at close range, but they should be easy to take out with fast-moving aircraft.”
I thought about it, and I agreed with the Major. I contacted Captain Sarin and asked her to throw a wing of fighters into the attack. Striking just as we came into range of these guns and made contact, we could sit back and let them make a pass. The air strikes should soften up the target.
“I’ll get her to put the gunships on it, too. We’ll bomb them into the stone age, then mop up with ground troops.”
“I’d like to show you something else, sir,” Sloan said. He handed me a pod of some kind. It was crusty and black.
“What’s this?”
“I think it’s an egg, sir. A Crustacean egg.”
I looked around in alarm. I’d noticed the bulbous objects in the gun nests of the enemy. I examined the object for a second. It did indeed look like a sea creature’s egg—a big one. It was a little bigger than a chicken egg.
“I thought Lobster eggs were carried around by the parents or something,” I said.
Sloan threw up his hands. “We don’t know much about their physiology. They do lay eggs, and those are eggs. They’re all over the island. The nests form nice circular depressions, like little craters.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “And the Macros have been using the nests to set up their guns. They’re perfect for the purpose.”
“For what it’s worth, sir,” Sloan said.
“Thank you, Major. It might be worth quite a bit.”
Sloan dismissed himself as I pondered the black egg and hustled up the slope after my troops. I knew the Crustaceans were in the area. They had troops here, sitting in the shallow areas of the ocean. So far, they hadn’t been willing to commit their forces to aid us. I knew they weren’t sure we would win, and the risks were high if we failed and they had to deal with the Macros on their own after we lost the battle.
But now we were facing a tough fight. This single island had already cost me a number of casualties. There were nine more islands to go, and the machines were building replacements out there under the sea as fast as they could. From the moment I’d landed, I knew I was in a race against time. The basic problem with fighting the machines had always been attrition. They could build a new soldier and load a program into its brain in hours. Human troops took about twenty years to mature and train. We just couldn’t keep up.
I looked upslope. I could see the peak now, the crown of the island. It was about five thousand feet high and it was a rocky, ugly crag. Climbing that under fire, just to take an alien island…
“Marvin?” I said, calling him directly. “Marvin, are you there?”
“Yes, Colonel Riggs.”
“Marvin, I need you to translate while I talk to the Crustaceans. Can you do a video link to my helmet camera?”
“Yes—but the quality will be poor in low light, and there will be a transmission delay.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “They don’t have to get a perfect picture. They probably won’t want one, anyway.”
“Opening connection…” Marvin said. “Testing connection…Link made.”
“Now, connect me with the Crustacean command council.”
“Connection request denied.”
“What?”
“Connection request denied.”
I rolled my eyes. “I got that. Why are they rejecting the request?”
“No reasons were given, sir. It’s a protocol element. A hand-shaking process is established between the initiating transmission device and the—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, growing impatient. “Okay, just send them the video feed. Send it to them as a series of still images, if you have to. No words, no two-way channels. Just images.”
“Transmitting.”
I stopped marching and dipped my head down to aim the camera at the broken egg in my hand. The camera on my helmet activated, causing a red light to glow inside my visor. An external floodlight snapped on.
Kwon came near and stepped from foot-to-foot. I knew he wanted to say something, but I was determined to get the attention of these responsibility-ducking Lobsters. They knew why I was calling. They had to know I wanted help, and they didn’t want to hear about it.
After a few seconds of staring at the damaged egg, I wandered over to the dished out nest where a gun had been. It was littered with broken shells.
“What are you doing, sir?” Kwon asked at last, unable to contain his curiosity.
I waved for him to hush and walked to another nest. This one was bigger, and I found it had scars where the tripod had been set. I examined these square holes which had been punched down into the walls of the nest.
“Are you still transmitting images, Marvin?”
“I’ve sent approximately six thousand stills, sir.”
“All right, turn off the feed. That should be enough to get them interested.”
Kwon picked up a broken egg shell and crushed it in his gauntlet before I could stop him. About a second after he did so, the camera light went out.
“Dammit, Kwon, quit fooling with that. It’s a Crustacean nest. They raised their young right here.”
“Their kids?” he asked, dropping the egg. “Did you take a picture of that?”
I thought about it. “Yeah, I think I did.”
“Bad idea,” he said, then stomped away after the rest of the battalion.
I hurried after him, frowning fiercely. I hoped Kwon hadn’t blown it. I hoped against hope that Marvin had stopped transmitting when I told him too, not when my helmet shut down. But I couldn’t be sure. I thought about asking Marvin, but it wasn’t worth the effort. The Crustaceans had either gotten the images or they hadn’t.
Marvin called me back about ten minutes later.
“Colonel Riggs? I have an incoming channel request from the Crustaceans. The request is flagged as urgent.”
“I bet it is,” I mumbled. “Okay, open the channel and translate for me, Marvin.”
“To the being known as Colonel Kyle Riggs,” said the aquatic voice. “We have received your images of violence and desecration. You’re barbarism quotient has reached new, unprecedented levels.”
“Please excuse any accidental damaging of your nests,” I said quickly, before they could call me any more names. “The purpose of the images was to inform and educate, nothing else.”
“You have achieved your goals. Never have we viewed such gruesome behavior on the part of a thinking biotic being. We’ve already commissioned a task force to rewrite our thesis on the topic of brutality among lower species. Up until this point, we’d believed the machines were heartless monsters, but you have reeducated us. We now know that biotic beings are worse.”
“Worse?” I asked. “How so?”
“Because you have young, and you therefore understand the protective instincts of a fellow biotic species. Had a machine crushed our young so callously, just to make a threat clear, it would been a lesser crime, as they are incapable of experiencing the agony they are causing. They would have the excuse of the ignorant.”
“Okay, look,” I said. “Let me stop you right there. I didn’t send you those images to threaten you. I sent them to show you what the machines are doing. They�
�re using the beds of your young—your nests—to place weapons systems. Check the images that study the Macro tripods and the imprints they leave.”
“Always, when the cheater attempts to explain his crimes, the discussion goes in this fashion. He vacillates from one lie to the next, hoping against hope one of them will hold sway. We have examined the evidence, and it is damning. Do you think we are mental incompetents?”
“Hold on a second—Marvin? Could you dig through the files on my helmet? I took video of the original gun emplacements about an hour ago, when we first encountered them on the beach. Transmit those. Transmit the battle we had to win to knock out those guns.”
“Searching…transmitting.”
The Crustaceans complained further while Marvin worked on complying with my orders. I had to hear all about how dumb I was, how cheaters were always caught and harshly punished, and how Crustaceans were not fools to be duped by the lowliest student. I endured this invective, trying to understand how they felt. They’d been horrified, and they needed to unload on somebody. Still, I was gritting my teeth by the time they stopped and switched directions.
“How were these images fabricated?” the Crustaceans asked suddenly.
“With my helmet camera,” I said.
“The Macros have a treaty with our people. They would not violate it in such a direct fashion.”
“Does that treaty take into account the treatment of your dead? Those sites were exposed and inactive when the Macros decided to make them into machinegun nests.”
The Crustaceans fell silent for several seconds. I was about to ask if the connection had been broken, when the voice came back on the line. “The desecration of grave sites is not specifically mentioned in the agreement,” the voice said, sounding defeated and sad.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “The machines have no consideration for others. Nothing like what we call ‘common decency’. We humans, on the other hand, are fighting to aid you against these monsters. We’re not the heartless ones, we’re your liberators. And yet, you will not help us.”
The connection was silent for a time. I sensed they were talking it out amongst themselves. I let them make their decision. I figured I’d made my point, and it was time for them to man-up. I’d stopped short of threatening to abandon the campaign, but that thought was in the back of my mind.
