Conquest (Star Force Series) Page 14

  They bladed away a widening oval shape around the spot. The missile had partly disintegrated and left an area of debris that was, well…missile-shaped. Within twenty minutes, the crawlers had the landing pit torn apart and a race-track shaped hole around the object a dozen feet deep.

  “This would make quite a swimming pool if we filled it in with gunite,” I joked with Kwon.

  The First Sergeant turned his suit laboriously to look at me. “A swimming pool, sir?”

  His English had never improved much and he tended to take things literally. I waved away my words. “Never mind, First Sergeant. I think the crawlers are done.”

  The two machines had made themselves a pathway that led out of the hole like an earthen ramp. They raced out of it now, arms whipping around overhead carrying their final loads of earth in their scoops. Wet clumps of sand dribbled from the swaying scoops as they passed me.

  “Mission accomplished,” the master unit said as it whizzed past. It had many other missions to attend to today, given the state of the base, so I didn’t ask any questions. The Crawler probably would have given unsatisfactory answers anyway.

  “Break out the spades, men,” I called to the waiting platoon. “This is the marines, so I know you guys know how to dig.”

  Indeed, they did know about digging. We headed down into that hole and circled the central mass that the crawlers had revealed. I almost regretted letting them get away. Perhaps they would have been more delicate with this next stage of the operation than my marines.

  Spades flashed in the sun, biting deeply into sandy soil. I helped until I grew tired of it, then joined Kwon in walking around supervising the men. Here and there, they found a smoking piece of black metal. I ordered them to switch to another spot immediately, not to keep poking at it. We were here to reveal this wreck, not to stab it with shovel blades.

  “The men want to know if they can open their suits, sir,” Kwon asked me.

  “No way,” I said, I’m not having any acute radiation sickness today.”

  “How about just their helmets? They are sweating in their suits.”

  I pointed out toward the sea. Strange clouds were still visible on the horizon. “The wind is going the right way, but I’m not taking a chance. No one breathes outside a suit on Andros until I say so.”

  “Very good, sir,” Kwon said. He didn’t sound like he thought it was very good, but he’d stopped complaining.

  It took us much longer than the crawlers took to dig out the rest of the wreckage. It would have taken us even longer if the mass hadn’t become unstable and resulted in a minor avalanche of sand.

  “Okay, pick yourselves up,” I said. Many of the men were standing waist or even helmet deep in wet sand. “Use your repellers if you need to. Help each other.”

  All around me men were climbing out of holes and servos whined while nanite-impregnated materials flexed to lift marines back into the afternoon sunlight.

  I think I was the one who saw it first, even though it didn’t grab me. None of these men had seen a Macro up-close except for Kwon himself. He was bent over double, pulling a private out of a mound of sand at the time.

  A familiar flash of bright metal. That was it, just bright metal and a sense of movement. It was more than enough to set off alarm bells in my head.

  “There’s something moving in there, men! Shoot long, steady beams. We have to disable it before it can set off the warhead.”

  Dirt flew. Flashing metal instruments—steel mandibles at the head of the Macro. They looked like a whirling mass of concentric lawnmower blades. I aimed my laser at the thorax and held down the firing button. A green glare filled the pit with brilliance. Everyone’s autoshades engaged to keep them from being instantly blinded.

  Men shouted, one screamed. The Macro had him and was tearing at his suit. He couldn’t get his guns into line with it. The other men fired further back along the monster’s metal body. Kwon joined me and we took the chance, firing deep into its guts, figuring if we didn’t the marine would be dead anyway. Some of those flashing tools were drills that could dig through armor and bore into the meat of a marine very quickly.

  Four concentrated beams did the job. The Macro crashed down, twitching and whining with straining servos. I stepped up, calling for a ceasefire.

  “All right, that’s it boys. Just make sure there aren’t two of them inside this thing.”

  The marines dug much more gingerly after that. No one talked about removing their helmets anymore. I checked out the marine who’d been grabbed by the Macro. His armor was scratched and dented in spots, but the plates had held. The Macro hadn’t been able to get to my man’s flesh. Almost as significant, I found the private had managed to wrestle with and twist away two of those numerous flailing limbs. Employing his exoskeletal strength, he’d managed to damage the Macro as much as he was being damaged, even in hand-to-hand combat. I was impressed.

  The single enemy Macro was the only one in the missile. I nodded to myself. It made a strange sort of sense. What better way to make a missile intelligent than to put one of your technicians aboard? Macro missiles were really kamikaze spaceships. They reminded me somewhat of my own men in battle suits. They just took it to the logical extreme, using their own troops like suicide bombers.

  The warhead, when we found it, was inoperable. I wasn’t surprised. If it had been repairable, the technician Macro would have set it off. There wasn’t much to learn other than that. The missile had a single large warhead, an engine not unlike a small ship engine and a Macro technician as a pilot. A human pilot would never have survived the impact, but steel alloys were much tougher than flesh.

  “There it is, Kwon,” I said, kicking the smoking ruin of metal. The Macro was pitted with laser strikes. “Take a good, long look.”

  “Here’s what, sir?”

  “The first Macro to invade Andros Island. I have a feeling it won’t be the last.”

  -20-

  We’d survived their opening salvo, but the battle was far from over. We had about thirteen hours of breathing time before the next stage began. When I say ‘breathing time’ I mean a sweating, scrambling time during which we repaired our facilities and dug in as best we could.

  I released about ten percent of our constructive nanite reserves to build more underground bunkers. I’d originally assumed our non-combatant personnel would be safe in villages located in more remote locations around the island, but I no longer believed that. Andros was about 2300 square miles of tropical paradise, mostly uninhabited even now that Star Force had taken it over. But the kind of toe-to-toe nuclear combat I’d seen today could easily devastate the entire landmass.

  Accordingly, we spent a lot of our time letting crawlers dig holes and dumped barrels nanites into them with orders to form walls. When the nanites formed a roof of liquid metal and it had time to take solid form, we dumped the dirt back on top of the new structure. These new bunkers weren’t very strong, really. They were like beer cans buried under a few inches of dirt. They couldn’t take a direct strike, but they were much better than standing on the surface.

  One area I was highly concerned about was my not-so-secret base on the western side of the island. I had a large number of my factories there, sitting inside sheds. Each of these sheds formed the basis for a laser turret. These were soon to become targets and might well be knocked out. The laser turrets had been intended to protect the duplication factories, but now I realized the turrets had become a danger to their existence by making them into targets.

  We did the best we could with the time we had. I dragged the factories out into the forest, dug holes, filled them with nanites and buried them again. From an aerial viewpoint, it was highly dissatisfying. The factory locations were easily marked by fresh earth. Running out of time, I ordered the marine garrison there to put one man into every laser turret and one man into every sealed bunker with the factory. The rest went around the area spreading patches of earth to make fake bunkers. We ran out of time when the garr
ison had managed to dig about six simulated bunkers for every real one. I was less than pleased. If the enemy cruisers hung up above, freely bombarding the site from orbit, it wouldn’t make any difference if there were three hundred bunkers for every factory. The Macros would keep firing until every interesting inch of the island was a blackened crater.

  I kept these thoughts to myself and returned to our deep command post under the Fort Pierre headquarters building. Sandra was down there with Major Sarin, and I was glad to see neither of them had yet killed the other. Every time I left those two alone, I worried. Sandra was far more dangerous and impetuous, but Jasmine had a sidearm at all times and she was sneaky. She was the quiet kind, the sort of woman you didn’t even know was in the room most of the time. I knew that if she decided to make a move some day, she would just draw and fire and that would be it. No speeches, no nothing.

  Sandra was the opposite. She was all flash and fire. You always knew she was coming and what she was thinking—but you could never be sure if she was mad enough to really do something serious or not.

  Kwon stumped down the metal steps after me. In his battle suit, even the nanites building the floors seemed to dent in and regret their existence under this heavy tread. We removed our helmets and joined the women. The four of us stood around the computer table, watching the Macro fleet decelerate overhead.

  The enemy loomed over the Indian Ocean, slipping into Earth orbit. They bore down on us out of the east, and like burrowing animals in the shadow of a hawk, we’d done our best to vanish underground.

  “They are over Africa now,” Kwon said, stating the obvious. “How long?”

  Major Sarin tapped one of her clocks, and made a flicking motion with her fingertip. A new clock spawned and shot across the table, appearing to spin. It came to rest in front of Kwon. He chuckled at the cool graphical effect.

  “Eleven minutes,” he said, and stopped chuckling as meaning of that number sunk in.

  I turned back to the big board. The dreadnaught was still in the lead, and if anything the train of cruisers behind it had hugged up closer to the big ship. Maybe they figured they would be protected in her wake. I hadn’t done battle with a dreadnaught yet, so for all I knew they were right. We watched as the fleet passed Africa and began the long glide northwest over the Atlantic toward our island. They were clearly planning to halt over Andros and decelerated continuously as they came.

  A signal beeped. “It’s General Kerr, Colonel,” Major Sarin said.

  “Open the channel.”

  “Riggs?” Kerr’s voice rang from the metal walls of the room.

  “Here, sir.”

  “Not for long, by the look of it. Do you want our help? Is this when we launch our ship-killers?”

  “I don’t want you to do that, sir,” I said. “Let Star Force handle this for now. If you launch from the states, they will know you are in this fight. Miami is a much softer target than my island. They don’t see us all as a single, unified enemy at this point. Don’t give them the opportunity to change their minds about that.”

  “I understand your plan, but do you really think they will let you guide them into your guns? To break themselves on your single fortified position?”

  “That is my sincerest hope, General.”

  “Sounds loony to me. If I was their commander, I’d change my plans.”

  “Fortunately, you are not,” I said with feeling. “The Macros are computers, sir. In most cases, computers do not reevaluate their decisions once they’ve been made without new input. Don’t give them that input.”

  “I’ll await new input myself, then. Either from you, or the enemy.”

  “One more thing, General,” I said before he disconnected. “I suggest you order your subs to submerge as deeply as you can. There’s a trench to the east of Andros called the Tongue of the Ocean. Send them down there. They’ll have a hard time burning that deeply into the ocean with a laser.”

  “What if they fire more missiles at you? The tridents worked so well last time, I figured you were going to be begging us for a repeat performance.”

  I shook my head and leaned against the computer. “Not this time, sir. They look like they’re coming right down to sit on us. If they fire their smart missiles from directly above, we won’t be able to stop them with a counter strike. We would have less than thirty seconds to react. Too short a time. I’d prefer you conserved the subs. We might well need every asset we have before this is over.”

  Kerr was quiet for a moment. I suspected he was calculating our odds of survival and not coming up with good numbers. I’d thought of this detail as well—the possibility the Macros would come in and unload the rest of their missiles on us at point-blank range. I didn’t think they would do it—but I couldn’t be sure. They’d lost badly the last time they’d fired a missile barrage, and Macros didn’t like to repeat an error twice. They didn’t know how slow and disjointed our command and control was. Macro Command could react quickly, so they tended to assume we could as well.

  “We’ll hold our fire then. Good luck down there, Riggs. Kerr out.”

  Major Sarin had put up a clock in the table area in front of each of us. The clock read seven minutes. I didn’t want to stare at it, so I tapped the X in the corner and the clock vanished.

  I looked up and saw everyone was looking at me. We didn’t have anything to do for four long minutes. I lifted an armored finger and pointed to the line of spread-open suits along the far wall.

  “I want you two suited up,” I told the women. “We’re all putting on full gear, helmets too. If they decide to unload on us, it might make the difference.”

  I thought for a second Sandra was going to object, but she didn’t in the end. Kwon and I helped the women get into their suits and adjusted their helmets. By the time we were done, the Macros were sliding into low orbit overhead. They had decelerated a great deal. We clanked back to the computer.

  “Be careful,” I said, “set the suit gloves to delicate-equipment setting so you don’t smash the tabletop. Remember to set them back if we get into a fight.”

  “Who are we going to fight down here?” Sandra asked.

  “Macros like landings. There are six invasion ships in the rear of that formation. They aren’t full of tourists. Remember the first time they came to Earth?”

  Sandra didn’t ask any more questions about it. We all stared as the last seconds ticked by.

  “They are almost in range, sir,” Major Sarin asked. “Any targeting changes?”

  “No,” I said. “We’ll stick with the battle plan for now. We’ll put a hundred or so beams on one cruiser at a time until it goes down.”

  There had been something of a spirited argument about that. Some of the commanders thought we should focus everything on that big bastard up front and burn it out of the sky. I didn’t like that idea, as I didn’t know how tough it was. If I spent several minutes of battle time shooting at it, even as they were taking my guns out one at a time, they might be able to retreat and keep the ship alive. Then I would be facing all the cruisers without having destroyed anything. On the other hand, I knew how much firepower it took to destroy one of their cruisers, having done so on several occasions in the past. Focusing on the smaller ships, we were guaranteed to destroy one about every ten seconds if we could get all thousand guns over the island on it at once. That would not be possible, however. If they were smart—and Macro Command was fairly smart—they would hang off one coast in a tight line and pound it, staying out of range of our guns on the other side.

  Unfortunately, as they approached, I could see this was exactly their plan.

  “They are down to a crawl, sir,” Major Sarin said. “They are going to bombard the east coast of the island.”

  “That’s why I had you put on these suits,” I said. The clock read eight seconds. “Hang on. This is liable to be quite a ride.”

  -21-

  The bombardment began about a minute after Major Sarin’s clock ran out. That was a good
thing, because they’d come in closer than I’d figured they would. That meant my laser turrets along the coastline were well within range.

  “Targeting priorities, sir?” Lieutenant Colonel Barrera asked.

  “Put a hundred on each cruiser, burn it until it goes down. Automatically retarget next available cruiser.”

  “Locked in sir. Are we ready to fire?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I wanted the Macros to come in as close as possible, allowing more of my turrets to be in effective range. Slowly, they glided near.

  I felt small, rumbling impacts.

  “The bombard had begun, sir,” Major Sarin said.

  “Any missile launches detected?”

  “None, sir. So far, their missile ports are staying closed.”

  I grinned inside my helmet. “That’s just how we want it,” I said.

  “Are we ready to fire, sir?” Barrera said.

  “Hold fire. Let them inch in closer. They don’t like to retreat, and I want as many guns in range as possible. Damage reports, Major Sarin?”

  “Two turrets knocked out, one damaged. Update: three knocked out, one damaged.”

  “Put some kind of damage meter up for me,” I said.

  She deftly tapped at her screen, scripting a tiny app. She was the best at this type of thing.

  “The ships appear to be down to a walking pace, sir,” Barrera reported over the strategic command channel.

  I thought I heard a tinge of worry in his voice. That was a rare thing, and it meant anyone else would be panicking at this point. I’d been holding back in hopes they would roll right over the center of the island allowing more of our guns to reach them. But if they were going to halt, we were taking hits now for nothing.

  “How many guns can we get on them now?”

  “About three hundred and sixty effectives, sir,” Sarin said. “That number is dropping….”