by B. V. Larson
Kwon laughed. She looked at him coldly.
“You should know him better than that by now!” Kwon said, marching into the passageway. He shouted orders to the squad of troops that waited there.
I paused, seeing the worried look in Jasmine’s eye. I hugged her lightly, not wanting to crush her with my exoskeletal armor. Her Fleet uniform was like paper compared to my gear.
I kissed the top of her head. “If they get to the engine core, we’re all dead anyway. Make sure every crewmember suits up. This might be a fight to the finish.”
She turned away, eyes glistening with emotion. She began shouting orders and handed over fleet ops to Admiral Newcome. There was precious little to do in that regard now.
The enemy had penetrated the hull of every ship in the task force. Most were only graced with a dozen invading marines. But, as we were on the only battleship in the fleet, we’d gotten around a hundred uninvited visitors.
This fight was to the finish now, I told myself. More than once, I’d invaded Macro ships and taken them from their rightful owners.
Maybe the machines thought it was payback time.
-15-
They came in like a swarm of bees. We were never quite sure how they breached the hull, but they seem to have some kind of new energy drill on the nose of specialized Macro marines. One in every sixteen of them had been built with this singular purpose in mind: to break into an enemy ship.
“A bomb would have been so much easier,” Kwon said as he trotted in front of me toward the breached zone.
Gamma deck had a hole in it, as did the aft region near engineering. We’d assigned ourselves defensive duty at the Gamma breach since it was closer to our starting position at the bridge. Another squad of defensive troops was heading to engineering. They weren’t marines, but Star Force Fleet people can put up a good fight when you put them in armor and tell them to defend their ship. I had high hopes for them.
“Yeah,” I said, huffing a bit when we reached a ladder and vaulted through an access point in the bulkhead. “A big bomb shoved through the hull is always easier. But their methods are effective, and they’re doing a lot less damage by drilling small holes than explosives would. I can see the beauty in their system. They’re designed to capture our ships rather than destroy them.”
Kwon craned his body around to look at me. I could see his face through this visor, and he wore a grimace of disbelief.
“Beauty? There’s nothing pretty about these metal bugs, Colonel. They’re evil machines. That’s all. About as beautiful as a dentist’s drill.”
“Yeah…” I said, letting him win the point. There was no use in trying to get Kwon to understand a designer’s viewpoint. He wasn’t a programmer or an engineer. He specialized in blowing things up rather than creating them.
But I’d always been impressed by Macro technology. It was so functional, so pure. There was no waste, no frills. If a cube-shaped object did the job, you got a cube out of them. No decorations or markings: A perfect cube.
That’s what these invasion robots were. They’d been carefully designed to do a specific job, and they were doing it very well. If I’d been forced to admit it, I’d have to say they were kicking our asses.
“I hate machines,” Kwon said as he crouched and scuttled forward on his knees.
It was an awkward pose for any armored man, but when Kwon did it he looked like a metal beetle.
“Are you sure?” I asked, crawling after him and looking for the enemy. “What about your weapons and your suit? Do you hate them too?”
Around us a dozen troops crawled on their bellies. Gamma Deck wasn’t like most of them. It wasn’t even a full-sized deck. It was more like a layer of equipment and tubing to support the decks below and above it. Rather than nice flat corridors and hatchways, it was a maze of piping and machinery. Usually only maintenance people came down here.
“You know what I mean, sir,” Kwon whispered, scanning the dark clutter around us for any sign of the enemy. “I’m talking about smart machines. I hate them.”
“Even Marvin?” I asked. “If it hadn’t been for his gravity-hammer, we’d have lost this fight and be dead and floating by now.”
“Yeah, you got me there. I don’t hate Marvin. He worries me, and I don’t always like him—but I don’t hate him. Okay, so I hate all machines except for—”
That was as far as he got. I was surprised, really, that the enemy had let us this close. They opened up from their positions where they’d lain in ambush as we crawled toward them.
There were sixteen of them and sixteen of us. The enemy was organized into four diamond-shaped teams of four. I counted their guns as they flared yellow-white, ripping apart the gloom. The equipment and piping around me popped, melted and sizzled.
Sixteen guns was the same size as my squad. I had a wild thought then: I should institute reforms upping our unit sizes slightly. That way we’d always outnumber them.
It was a silly idea, but you never know what might be going through your mind when the fireworks start. Usually, I didn’t think about much other than staying alive and killing the enemy. However, sometimes I experienced flashes of sights and sounds from my past, or memories of home – especially if I took a hit and felt stunned.
“Left flank,” Kwon shouted suddenly, “hunker down. Right flank, give them covering fire. The enemy is concentrating left. You know the drill, stick to it.”
He was a first-class fighter and a great sergeant. The men had just the right level of fear mixed with respect for him. I don’t think they feared him physically even though he dwarfed most of them. They feared his reputation, and the number of fights he’d walked away from, leaving dead comrades and enemies strewn behind. It was hard not to be intimidated by facts like that.
I agreed with his tactical decisions, and as I was on the left flank, I hunkered down with the rest of them. A storm of laser bolts burned the air over our heads. The entire crowded region of Gamma Deck was filling with wisps of smoke as lasers vaporized metal. Hit or miss, almost everything down here was metal.
“They’re shifting to hit us on the right now, sir,” Kwon said. “And I haven’t counted any kills yet. They have heavier front plating than they used to, I think.”
“Okay, let’s change things up a little. Hand grenades, I want them all tossed at once.”
“Sir, I don’t think that’s such a—”
“Frag out!” I shouted, pressing a stud and throwing my grenade into the face of the enemy who had taken this opportunity to scuttle forward. We were busy ducking, and they were trying to get in close.
“Throw one each, men!” I ordered over the command channel.
The men didn’t hesitate. They pulled out their tactical grenades, armed them with a click of their thumbs and lobbed them toward the enemy.
These grenades didn’t behave like the old-fashioned dumb weapons. We’d done a little bit of design work ourselves over the years. These were smart grenades. They had onboard magnetometers, tiny brainboxes and even propulsion systems. Essentially, they were tiny, suicidal drones. Programmed to seek and destroy Macro-sized metal objects, they homed in and exploded, not on a timer and a fuse, but rather like tiny mines seeking ships in space.
Explosions blossomed. A moment later, I stood up, and the men around me cheered.
Only two of the machines had survived. We’d wiped them out. We concentrated fire and melted the last two. They took a lot more heat to burn down than usual, and I was certain they had new armor. But the last one finally died, scrabbling and kicking like a bug touched by a match.
“We only lost one man, Kwon!” I shouted.
“Yeah, but you took out that big box over there.”
I followed his outstretched hand and frowned. “Hmm,” I said. “It is about the size and weight of a Macro. Someone’s grenade must have gotten confused.”
“They told me not to use grenades down here on Gamma,” Kwon complained. “They said I would wreck something critical.”
I broke off in surprise. “Huh…I’m floating now.”
We all were.
“I think the ship’s gravitational system is dead, sir,” Kwon said.
“Yeah, dammit.”
We were in free-fall. As the damaged device died, things went from bad to worse. Potemkin wasn’t just gliding along through space, after all. The entire fleet was still accelerating, and now we could feel the full weight of that acceleration.
Men tumbled and grunted, falling toward the aft bulkhead. Gamma Deck was filled with a lot of obstacles and darkness, and the limited space was crowded with men, equipment and dead Macros.
It was a mess. Men grunted and shouted curses. Visors starred and some troops were pinned under a mass of struggling bodies.
I was one of the unlucky ones. Two Macro hulks crashed down on top of me at the far end of the deck. Fortunately, I was already connected via com-link to the bridge.
“Bridge? This is Riggs. Kill the engines. We’re no longer being pursued. Coast. Do not decelerate or accelerate. I repeat—”
“Colonel?” Jasmine’s voice asked in my ear. “What did you do down there? I see your location—Gamma Deck.”
“That’s correct. Could you shut off the engines, please?”
“They’re cycling down now. It will be a few minutes.”
I cursed and complained inside my helmet. I was glad I was wearing hardshell armor, as I would have been crushed otherwise. Finally, after what seemed like a very long time, the pressure eased, and we all started floating again.
“Colonel?” Jasmine was saying again. “Could you get to engineering? They’re having trouble down there. We might lose the deck.”
“Roger that, I’m on my way. Tell them relief is coming and to fight a defensive battle until the marines arrive.”
I thought about my relatively untrained fleet people fighting with these new-and-improved Macro killing machines. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
“Message relayed, sir,” Jasmine said. “And Kyle, did you wreck my ship?”
“Uh—Kwon did it.”
“I should have known!” she said, and broke off.
Kwon drifted closer to me when I flipped back to proximity chat. “What did she say? Is she pissed? You blew a hole in her baby, and women never forget that kind of thing, you know.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a little guilty about blaming Kwon. “I know. But don’t worry. She’ll get over it.”
We hustled aft through a system of hatchways and worked our way to the rear of the ship.
“Colonel?” Jasmine called me again. “You have to hurry. They’ve engaged and are taking losses. They can’t use grenades without wrecking the engines.”
“We’ll be there in sixty seconds.”
When engineering was right below our position on Gamma Deck, I ordered my men to break through the deck-plates in unison.
This maneuver isn’t as hard as it sounds. In many places on a modern cruiser, our decking was built with smart materials holding together the larger sheets of pure metal. If you went to a joint, and had the right security codes, you could break through into whatever was on the far side just by telling the nanites to let go.
So when we did storm through, we did it all at once. An avalanche of marines came falling out of the ceiling of the engineering deck along with dislodged deck plates and drifting clouds of constructive nanites. They’d been the glue between the plates for so long they didn’t seem to know what to do when ordered to release in zero G. They formed swirling swarms that looked like tiny tornadoes of metal filings.
We unloaded on the machines point-blank. We were in their midst, and we made a happy discovery: their improved armor was only effective in the front. That made sense as it would have been difficult to armor up every machine without weighing it down so much it couldn’t move.
Caught from the sides and rear, our lasers punched through their hulls and burned their guts out before they could do much. In the entire action, we only lost one man who was gored to death by a thrashing machine in its death throes.
The Fleet people, unfortunately, weren’t so lucky. They’d been wiped out.
“We were too slow,” I said, checking each armored corpse for vitals.
“I found one alive here!” Kwon shouted.
We gathered around and helped stabilize a dying midshipman. The woman wouldn’t see action for weeks, but she’d live.
The rest were dead: About thirty of them.
“They fought bravely,” I said. “But these new lasers—the burns are terrible.”
Kwon banged his gauntlet on my back. I rocked in my armor.
“We can’t live forever, sir,” he said. “We won. We saved the ship. That’s what counts.”
“Yeah,” I said, still frowning.
I almost found it odd that the battle bothered me. I’d seen a lot of action in my time, more than most men have in a lifetime, but I still didn’t like to see a unit wiped out. That part of my life had never become routine.
-16-
Our task force glided through the ring and into friendly space. I called a timeout on the bridge, releasing the staffers who’d been on duty for back-to-back shifts. Everyone sighed in relief. There was still plenty to do, of course. The hull had to be patched, and the wounded had to be tended to, but the immediate danger was over.
I let the sleepless, ticking nanites tend to the small stuff. While they cleaned up the mess the battle had left in its wake, I headed toward my quarters lost in thought.
I eyed the bunk I shared with Jasmine but walked around it and went to the single window instead. The window in my quarters was a real one. This old Imperial ship still had vestiges of the past, and this was one of the ones I liked. Despite the inefficiency in terms of lost heat and imperfect viewing, nothing could fully replace the human eye staring through a pane of glass.
I knew that my engineering people would scoff at that sentiment. Often, a high-resolution screen gave a better idea of what was outside a ship, but a real window provided me with a certain grounded feeling. It was an unplanned, unaltered view of the universe.
I tapped the panel below the small, angular window, and the blast shield outside slid away. The glass was a little frosty with condensation, but I could see space with my own eyes. To the left was Eden, a cheery yellow star. It looked distant and small from our position out near the battle station, but I was still happy to see it. Close at hand was Welter Station in all its bristling glory. In many ways, I still considered the station to be my finest defensive achievement. Even if all four hundred Macro ships had made it through the nearby ring and entered local space here, I felt confident that the station’s guns would have destroyed them all.
Below us, slipping away almost as quickly as the station, was Hel, a cold, unforgiving rock. It was the twenty-first planet in the star system and the farthest from the yellow sun.
As always, I felt better just knowing I was in the Eden System. These days it felt like home to me—maybe even more than Earth itself did.
In my mind, I immediately took that thought back. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Earth, it was that I loved the old Earth, the world I’d grown up on. That Earth seemed like a distant memory now. I missed my farm and the quiet countryside. I ached for blue skies and fresh winds. No voices had been buzzing in my helmet or kissing-up to me in the old days—with the possible exception of a few desperate students who’d missed their final exams.
Today, I was no longer a regular guy living his life. When I was on Earth, I felt weighed down with vast responsibilities.
“What are you thinking about?” Jasmine asked.
I turned and looked down. She had appeared at my side and now stood watching my face. She had entered the room so quietly, I hadn’t even known she was there.
“I’m having a rare philosophical episode,” I said.
She looked worri
ed for a moment, furrowing her brow. “That doesn’t sound like you. Were you hit on the head or something?”
I laughed out loud, and she smiled. I wasn’t even sure whether or not she was serious, but it didn’t matter.
“It looks like this adventure is over,” she said, still watching me.
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “We sent in the probe, and it didn’t work. But it did trigger a Macro attack. Everything is pretty much the way it was before we came out here.”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. We have a fix on a point in space. There’s something out there, something hiding in a deep void, less than a light year from Earth. We can’t rest with the machines sitting so close.”
Her face darkened, and she stepped around my body until she was in front of me, between my chest and the frosty window.
“You said Marvin had made a mistake,” she said. “And that they couldn’t be out there.”
I shrugged. “I say a lot of things. I didn’t want people to be distracted. I wanted everyone to focus on the battle.”
“You lied?”
“Sort of. It does seem hard to believe the Macros could be in the middle of nowhere without a star system—but it makes a certain kind of sense, too, doesn’t it? They’ve been quiet for so long. What have they been doing?”
“Building ships and improving their technology so they could beat us the next time.”
I nodded. “Yes, that, and something else, too.”
“What?”
“I think they’ve been watching us, staring at us with their cold, electronic eyes. They’ve been sitting out there in the dark, studying us and trying to figure out how to beat us. That’s why their ships were faster this time. Their assault-missiles were full of countermeasures. Even their marines were different. They’ve upgraded them with much better forward armor. They would have won today if Marvin hadn’t trumped them with his gravity weapon.”
Jasmine seemed not to like any of this talk. She had her head against my chest now. That was unusual for her. She rarely seemed to need comforting of any kind. I touched her hair lightly and rested my hand on her back. I didn’t hug her. Sometimes when I hugged a girl it knocked the wind out of her. I didn’t want to take the chance.
