by B. V. Larson
There was a delay. It was longer than usual. Maybe the Macros were preoccupied with the landing. Or maybe the original Macro commander had been blown away by an enemy mine and now I was being rerouted to the backup.
“Channel open,” said the command module at last.
“Translate and relay: I am Kyle Riggs, Star Force Marine Commander. I need to know our mission goals.”
“Incoming Message: Destroy resisting indigenous biotics.”
I sighed. Were we supposed to kill every bug we found on the planet? “Give us the coordinates of the enemy’s most vital area.”
A series of numbers came back. I waved my hand at Captain Sarin and our useless navigator. They worked quickly on the big board and pinpointed the spot. I was alarmed when I saw the goal coordinates.
“We have to get to the top of that eighty thousand foot peak?” I asked.
“No sir,” said the navigator, working his fingers on the screen. The image quickly shifted to a side view. “The actual location is underneath the big mountain, at about sea-level. It’s miles deep inside the mountain itself.”
“Great,” I said, getting the picture. We were going to have to dig them out. Suddenly, I understood why the Macros had brought us here. Their big machines weren’t capable of going down narrow tunnels. Maybe the enemy were strong enough to fight off their smaller, worker-class machines.
“I get it,” I said. “They can’t get into the tunnels. So, it’s time to send in the marines.”
I felt everyone staring at me. I ignored them. “Command module, relay this: If we reach this goal spot and destroy all resistance, will we have completed our mission on this world?”
The answer came swiftly this time. “Incoming Message: Send transmission when goal reached.”
I disconnected with Macro Command. I soon felt gravity again. We were coming down into the atmosphere. “This is to be an underground campaign. Regear all our troops accordingly. Order supply to prep scripts for extra lighting, climbing equipment, suit-tethers and the like. We put this option on the menu, I remember the meetings.”
Major Robinson worked his screen quickly. “It wasn’t one of our top possibilities. But we can do it.”
“Not even one of the top five maybes? We know this is a job the Macros wanted us for, specifically. We saw the enemy images a long time ago. They are stretched-out bugs. No one thought of tunnels?”
I looked around at my staff. They shrugged and pecked at their screens. I felt a shouting outburst coming up from my lungs, but I fought to hold it back. I forced myself to remember how green we all were. We had the finest tech humanity had ever wielded in a single force. But we had never done this before. This was our first invasion of an alien world. Theory was meeting up with reality, and there were bound to be mistakes.
“It’s okay,” I said, forcing down the tirade that bubbled within me. “We’ll get through it. We’ll learn from this. Now, give me a force-list run-down. Give me the bad news first. Let’s recalculate our effectiveness unit by unit and come up with a plan to improve it.”
This got them working again, instead of sulking. We’d drawn up plans for many different goal environments. Now that we had finally arrived, ninety-five percent of those plans were useless. I consoled myself with one thought: at least this wasn’t an underwater campaign.
I took the time to study the looming mountain, zooming in to run a camera over the terrain. “See those blast marks?” I asked Robinson, tapping on the screen.
“They look like recent hits,” said Robinson. “There are a lot of them. I’d say they are the result of the Macro bombardment. Maybe that’s why we aren’t under any kind of barrage yet. They probably took out their missile and artillery emplacements.”
I nodded. “Sounds right to me. Now, give me the bad news. What can we do to adapt to an underground campaign?”
“The hovertanks will probably not function underground as currently designed,” Robinson told me. “They are built for wide open spaces. I’m assuming the tunnels will be too small for big Macro machines-and that’s why they brought us.”
“Their ability to apply logic is certainly stronger than our own,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to keep bitterness out of my voice. Why hadn’t I put this possibility higher up on our list? It seemed so obvious in retrospect.
“Yes, ah-the hovertanks are built for long range, for flying fast over open terrain. Their beam turrets are high and not built to run into rock ceilings. We will have to do a full redesign to make them effective underground.”
“Okay,” I said, “what about our troops?”
“We have decent gear for this environment. We’ve been emphasizing lighter, lower-powered equipment to reduce the weight of each marine’s kit. Our marines should do fairly well even with the high gravity. To prepare for underground operations, we’ll use the factories to produce more effective tunnel-rat equipment.”
“Good. What about our mobile base?”
“Not good,” said Robinson. “If the hovertanks won’t fit into a tunnel, then the bricks certainly won’t. They can’t be significantly reconfigured. This means when we set up our base, it will have to be out in the open. Our supply lines for men, machines, ammo and medical will all have to trace down into the tunnels. The deeper we go, the longer and more vulnerable these lines will become.”
I crossed my arms, closed my eyes and thought hard. I couldn’t see a way out of the scenario he was painting. Tactically, we should win in the open, if they faced us here. But once underground, every foot we went deeper into their lairs, they would have the increasing advantage.
As I tried to think I realized the heavy gravity was setting in, forcing my heart to pump harder. My body and mind felt sluggish. I opened my eyes again when the floor rolled under my magnetic boots. We had landed.
“It’s go time!” I shouted, clapping my hands together. “Tell the hovertank pilots to rev up. Put a fireteam of four into each vehicle. We’ll send out six of them, and if they survive, then six more.”
Everyone took up their com-links and began talking at once, relaying my instructions.
“External cameras, I want a feed from the hold. Aim it at those big doors.”
My staff soon had the image on the screen. The big floods were on. The floor of the hold was buzzing with activity. Marines scuttled to the back of the hovertanks and were swallowed by them. They each carried lighter rifles, similar to the ones I’d first built for the failed attempt to hold back the Macros in Brazil. The heavy beamers were just too much weight for this world. They also carried gleaming combat knives and light beam-pistols like the practice units Sandra and I had used in the training bricks.
I watched the men with a surge of pride. I’d help build them up, and they were rushing eagerly to invade a world we’d never even seen up until this moment.
The big doors at the back of the cylindrical Macro transport split to form a cross of lurid red light. The cross widened and yawned as the four leaves spread open. We’d been hiding in this tin can so long, everyone was blinking at the unaccustomed light.
The mountain was directly ahead of us. I could see only the base of it, filling my view of the world. It was like a reddish-brown wall of crumbling stone. A wall so tall it had to have been built by the hands of gods.
“The bottom leaf has touched down, sir,” said Captain Sarin.
“Go! Hovertank group one: Go, go go!” I shouted into the com-link. Every hood in the taskforce buzzed with my words.
The first line of hovertanks surged forward as if goaded. They swept out of the hold and immediately separated into two groups of three, heading off to either side of the transport.
“Should we release the second squad, sir?” asked Major Robinson.
“Let me see the feed from the hovertanks first,” I said.
We watched the screens. Three hovertanks split into two groups and vanished. The view from the command tank was relayed to a window in front of me. I dialed for clarity. The image was jumpy as the
tank swept around the Macro transport in a widening circle. I saw and heard laser fire.
“What are they shooting at? Turret view!” I said.
I caught a glimpse of a dead bug, a worm-like thing that closely resembled the creature I’d killed on the dissection tables. Its back was burned away and steamy vapor rose from the carcass. It appeared to be unarmed.
I heard more turrets firing. Red digits floated above the various hovertanks on the screen, rapidly flipping to new values as the computers recorded and displayed their hit-miss ratios.
“Reset those turret scripts. Put them on defensive-fire, not aggressive-fire. Our mission here is to destroy resistance, not perform genocide.”
I flipped through the different views. “Who set those tanks to autofire?” I asked.
Major Robinson lifted a hand-the hand transformed into an accusing finger which pointed at me. “It’s still your basic script, sir. Those things aren’t human, they tripped the software as enemies. Just as you would have wanted if they had come up on the beaches of Andros Island.”
I hissed a long breath through my teeth. He was right. If those things didn’t qualify to my AI as alien and possibly hostile, I didn’t know what would. I recalled back on Andros Sandra had freaked me out a little bit with her idea of having kids plant bombs at the base of my beam turrets. Taking an approach of letting the other guy shoot first was too dangerous, I’d realized…. I had written the turret scripts to identify suspicious alien attackers and to fire first. At the time, I’d been thinking of Macros sneaking up on my laser turrets, but now these seemingly harmless locals had set off my software.
“Okay, mistake number forty-two. Someone write that one down, please.”
Running this high-tech army was a lot like programming, I realized. Except that with each error I made, things died.
— 44-
We had all our hovertanks out and positioned, forming a circle around our perimeter. I made sure the Macro transport ship was inside the perimeter and made it clear it was a priority for defense. Without that ship, none of us would be going home.
About half my marines were on the perimeter while the rest worked on unloading. Within two hours the landing site had transformed into a semi-fortified encampment. We used the nanites to turn the ground under us into a barrier by weaving themselves into the soil. We’d practiced this anti-tunneling nanite script back home. I’d come up with it after the Brazil campaign, but at that time I’d been thinking about slowing down the Macro burrowing machines. The effect of the nanites was to harden the soil into a pad beneath us. It wasn’t as tough as concrete, but it was fast and took virtually no effort on our part. Onto this pad of woven soil, we began the lengthy process of unloading nearly five hundred huge bricks-each of which was about twice as heavy here as they had been on Earth.
We used about a tenth of our bricks as walls, forming an inner security zone. This wall had gaps, and didn’t go all the way around the Macro ship. We placed and locked our bricks together, connecting several rocking outcroppings into what was roughly a hexagonal pattern. This was the core of our safe zone, and we stacked the rest of the bricks inside it, three layers deep.
The surface temperature in daylight was around a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit. Our suits had air conditioners and the nanites did their best to reflect the heat, but everyone was sweating within twenty minutes of our arrival.
I stood on top of a pile of boulders that made up one corner of the wall of bricks. Around me, a dozen marines aimed their rifles into the desolate terrain. Captain Sarin had been wrong-this was no garden of greenery. Everything was washed out with reddish light, making all colors blur into shades of orange and brown. There was vegetation-mostly stumpy growths that looked like they belonged at the bottom of an ocean. There were ugly, gray sponges and even uglier bulbous, tan things that resembled mushroom caps the size of pickups. And there was moss everywhere. Lots of moss.
“Sir?” asked Sergeant Kwon, crunching up to me. I noticed his feet sank deeply into the moss and the soil beneath. We were all twice our normal weight, and that put Sergeant Kwon into the seven hundred pound range, plus gear. He bore it all naturally, however. He looked right at home on this heavy world. His thick, layered body and round bear-like features seemed natural here.
“Good to be on solid ground again, isn’t it, Sergeant?” I asked.
“Yes sir,” he said, looking around and frowning.
He didn’t look terribly happy to be here. “What’s the matter?” I asked him.
“This place, sir. What do we call it?”
“Doesn’t have a name.”
“I know. But it should. No man should die in a strange place that doesn’t even have a name, sir.”
I looked at him. I nodded, finding his logic unassailable. “Right you are, Kwon. Do you have a name in mind?”
“Never went to school much, sir,” he said.
“How about Helios?” I asked.
“What’s it mean?”
“Helios was big in ancient Greece. He was the Sun Titan-sort of an early sun god.”
Kwon looked up at the huge, red star. It was dimmer than ours; you could stare right at it without burning your retinas out of your head. But it filled about three times more of the sky than our brighter yellow star did.
Kwon nodded. “Helios. Okay.”
I watched him stump away. I wondered how many of us would die here, and if any of the dead would feel any better about it now that the place had a name. Maybe Kwon would.
Our next surprise came when the Macro transport quietly lifted off. Some of my men had to leap for their lives off the ramp, which closed slowly like a giant lamprey’s mouth. They scrambled off the triangular wedge of metal and gaped up at the ship as it closed the hold in which we had spent many long days. Once the great doors were closed, the ship rose slowly into the atmosphere and went to join the last cruiser in orbit.
“Guess we’re stuck here now, sir,” Robinson buzzed in my ear.
“Yeah. I think I’ll build a summer cottage in those hills to the west.”
“Do you think they’ll come back for us, sir? Once the mission is finished?”
“Sure they will, Major. They won’t waste good troops. It would be… inefficient. All we have to do is finish the mission.”
“Yes sir,” the Major said.
I raised my eyebrows, surprised my glib argument had worked on him. I had no idea if the Macros would come back. I supposed that had always been the job of mission commanders, to provide confidence to subordinates. I wondered whose job it was to blow sunshine into my ears.
When the third hour passed, the sky fell suddenly and intensely dark. Helios had a short rotation period of only nine hours. This made the transition from day to night three times shorter than what we were used to. Accelerating the effect was the looming mountain nearby which blocked the massive, red star before it went down completely. Once night had swept over the alien landscape, the darkness was more complete than it normally was on Earth. The planet had no moons. There was only starlight overhead, and the thicker, hazy atmosphere blocked much of that.
The temperature dropped dramatically-going down with the sun. Like any desert, the days were hot and the nights were surprisingly cold. Fortunately, our suits were more than up to the task of adjusting for the variance. We’d planned for much worse conditions.
We were still interconnecting the bricks when the enemy hit us. It turned out the bugs-or Worms as we came to call them-were smarter than I thought. The best time to hit a beachhead was as soon as possible with massive force. The goal was always to knock it back immediately. Any invasion is at its weakest at the moment of arrival. We hadn’t set up. We hadn’t had time to dig in. We had very little ground covered. We were new to the territory. We hadn’t had time yet to scout the area. We had barely begun to set up our fortifications.
“Sir,” my com-link buzzed. “This is Major Yamada. I’ve got contacts.”
“What are your tanks telling
you, Major?” I asked. I stopped walking around on my pile of boulders and listened intently. Yamada was the commander of my hovertanks. They were my primary defense during the fortification effort. Most critically, they had the only sensor arrays currently deployed, one of the garbage-can like devices was a central component of every hovertank. Until I had stationary sensors and beam turrets set up, the hovertanks were my eyes as well as being my primary defensive units.
“Mass contacts, coming in columns,” Yamada told me, “But we’ve scanned the plain around us with infrared visuals. We haven’t spotted anything.”
I nodded. “That’s probably because they are tunneling underneath us. We have to think in three dimensions here, Major. Prepare for battle. I don’t want to see any of your pilots leaning against their machines taking a piss. Patrol the perimeter. Don’t let your tanks get caught as stationary targets.”
“Roger that, sir,” Yamada said, breaking off.
Within moments, the entire hovertank group lifted and began gliding slowly around our cluster of stacked bricks. Their beam turrets swiveled independently-aiming primarily at the ground.
“Men,” I said, addressing the entire unit via my com-link override. “We are about to make contact with the enemy. An attack in imminent. Take your posts and expect the unexpected.”
Although Helios had fallen into a pitch-black night, lamps had been set up to keep the camp brightly lit. These lamps beamed down from atop every brick we’d placed and locked down. I watched as my troops got my message and digested it. The effect on the marines was intense. They had been glancing around in concern, watching the hovertanks begin to move, but now they were openly alarmed. Men ran and sprang into foxholes.
I cursed as I watched this last. It was a natural reaction. Now, I wished we’d never dug a hole in the camp. I reopened the channel.
“Marines, everyone get out of those holes. I don’t want to see any boots on flat ground. Get up on top of the bricks or find a boulder to hug. Move.”
Men scrambled like rats, adjusting equipment, shouting. The Worms didn’t give us much time. Unsurprisingly, they came out of the ground. What did surprise me were the machines they rode upon. I should have expected a mechanized attack, I realized that the moment I saw it boiling up out of the crunchy soil of Helios. I’d known they were technologically advanced. But somehow, I’d always thought I would see these Worms as naked beasts. I should have known that if they’d been able to plant thermonuclear mines in space, they wouldn’t be coming at us with nothing more than pinchers and garden tools. But I’d always envisioned this as a bug-hunt. I’d figured I would be fighting hand-to-hand with a knife in each palm, slashing my way through piles of charging Worms.
