Battle Station sf-5 Read online

“Sir, we have to get the hell out of here,” Sloan continued. “We can’t hold on. We have no idea how long Miklos will take to get here. We have to assume we are on our own.”

  Sloan had a point, but I didn’t see much else we could do. We were pinned down, and our only means of mobility was now twenty feet underground. I glanced toward the bunker, and I noticed it shook and shivered with the Macros that invaded it. They poked their pinchers through the loopholes, seeking something, anything to tear apart. Soon, they would figure out we’d completely abandoned that position and they would come tunneling toward us.

  My eyes flicked up to the factory itself. We could fly up there and play king-of-the-hill with the enemy, but it seemed like losing proposition. It wasn’t designed as a defensive position. In retrospect, I wished I had built my bunker up there instead. I gave my head a shake inside my helmet. Sweat dribbled down into my eyes and burned. I tasted the droplets a moment later in my mouth. With one eye half-open and bleary, I gazed at the factory. I had to think of something.

  “Marvin,” I snapped a moment later.

  “Yes, Colonel Riggs,” came the reply. Marvin sounded as calm and crisp as always.

  “Can you communicate with the factory still? Will it take your orders?”

  “Yes. Now that I’m above ground, I’m linked with the local production facility. The enemy has not yet regained control of it.”

  “How long would it take to build a new tank, like the one you are standing on?”

  “Just under an hour. There isn’t enough palladium dust, however. We’d have to reduce the-”

  I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. Forget it. We’ll all be dead in an hour. Can it make a-ah-how about a Macro worker? One that obeys us instead of Macro Command?”

  Marvin hesitated. “Yes, I believe so. But each unit would require several minutes of production time.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, thinking fast. I was hunkered down in the crater, and programming under these conditions was unreasonable. Overhead, the storm of fire seemed to be on the increase.

  “They’ve got a new team up on top of the factory, sir,” Sloan told me. “They have a good firing position on the far side of the crater, our men are exposed.”

  “Great,” I said. “Kwon, get a squad to concentrate on taking them out, sharpshooter style. Or at least keep them ducking.”

  “On it, sir!”

  “Marvin,” I said, switching channels. “I want you to program the factory to make small Macros. Little spider-sized guys.”

  “The facility is inefficient in that regard. Something that is under a gram in size-”

  “No, no, not that small,” I said. “Let me explain more carefully, I want a climbing robot that is dumb and simple, about as big as a dog-five percent of the mass of a single Macro worker. Can you produce those quickly?”

  “I believe so. The designs are available, and already loaded. Very few specialized materials would be-”

  “Okay, great,” I said. “Now, I’ve got one more modification to these little robots that I want you to add. Then I want you to stamp out as many as you can. Batches of them all at once.”

  Marvin listened closely, and he assured me what I proposed was possible. After the program was engaged and the big machine began humming, I went back to firing my laser at anything metallic that moved. I hoped Marvin had done his programming right, because we were going to be overrun and wiped out soon.

  — 20

  The first batch of spider-bots that rolled off the line was a surprise to everyone, even me. I never even saw the first one reach its target, but I did see the explosion.

  “What the heck was that?” Sloan demanded, pointing toward a knot of Macros that now were scattering.

  In their midst, one of their number appeared to have malfunctioned. It was lying on its side and a small plume of dust hung near. Another group of them popped a moment later. This time, I was certain of what I was seeing. It was as if a grenade had gone off in the middle of them.

  I laughed. “That, Captain Sloan, is my latest joke on the Macros. They are being blown up by their own kind.”

  I quickly explained my small spider-bots with their explosive charge payloads. They had very simple programming. They were to find the nearest, largest group of Macros, run into the middle of them, and blow themselves up.

  “Diabolical, sir,” Sloan said, smiling.

  I noticed he was hugging the crater edge, not bothering to fire at the enemy. We were down to ten effectives now, and I needed every gun on the line. But I held back from ordering him to keep up the defensive fire. The Macros were now in a confused state. They were scuttling around, being chased by tiny replicas of themselves. Some tried to turn and slash their pursuers. This gambit inevitably resulted in a flash and a loud bang. With their front sections blown off, the back legs spazzed for a while then finally ground to a halt.

  Others tried to get away by climbing the big machine. This was a big mistake. We were able to pick them off up there, or at least wound them and slow them down enough for one of our scuttling little demons to catch up and take them out.

  “Marvin, send a squad of spiders up to sit on top of the factory and wait for any new snipers who get the bright idea of shooting us from up there.”

  “Done, sir. We’ve almost run out of bots, however.”

  “How long until the next batch is done?”

  “Just under four minutes, sir.”

  In a firefight, four minutes was an eternity. But the Macro assault had already been broken. They were still sniping at us, and I could tell by the occasional underground explosion they were still tunneling. The last of my spider-bots found these tunnelers and detonated, collapsing the earth down upon their maimed bodies.

  I ordered my men to stay low. We traded power with one another, rationing out what we had left. The generators never seemed to produce enough for a prolonged firefight. Carlson’s suit was a boon, as he had a nearly full charge. As a group, our power reserves averaged twenty-four percent when we’d finished. Our generators would charge every suit up to full eventually, but that would take time-time we didn’t have.

  We stopped firing, and there was a lull that both sides needed. The spider-bots were all dead before the next batch was due to arrive. I knew Macro Command was out there, coming up with a new plan of action against us. I wished I still had a sensor-box that functioned. It was unnerving not to know if the enemy was tunneling under our position.

  We made plans to coordinate our next effort with the arrival of a fresh load of spider-bots. With luck, we could take the attack to them. It was my guess they were running out of Macros. I was proud of my marines and impressed with what one of these production facilities could do to defend itself. Clearly, the Macros lacked an active imagination. They could have created a thousand varied weapons systems with which to hit us over the years. Instead, they’d stuck with their basic designs. These were good, but adapting to battlefield conditions required more thinking than that. In short, I didn’t think biotics were necessarily more intelligent than the Macros-but were definitely more inventive.

  It was not until the next batch of spider-bots were produced that I was given a reason to stop congratulating myself. By that time, the Macros had all but halted their assault. When the batch came into play, however, the situation changed dramatically.

  Macros might not be good at creating their own designs, but they were good at analyzing weaknesses in an enemy variation. This became abundantly clear when Marvin gave me the fateful message: “New spider-bots being deployed now, Colonel.”

  “Good,” I said. I was all smiles and ignorance. “Start another batch. Men, get ready to fire into any Macro that runs. Take out the legs so our little guys can catch up.”

  Marines chuckled in my headset. Everyone was enjoying this. We all wanted to watch Macros run and die from their own kind-we couldn’t get enough of the spectacle. I’d even taken to making vids of the action with my suit. It would play over and over in the officer
’s canteen, I figured, when we got back to base.

  “Sir! Incoming!”

  I cranked my helmet around, frowning. Laser fire began spitting from every rifle around me. Then I saw it. A Macro worker, running full tilt away from one of my little spider-bots.

  There was nothing unpleasant about that, but the destination of the worker-that was the problem. He wasn’t trying to climb the factory, or dig into a hole, or heading for the glimmering walls of the dome itself. He was running right at us, where we crouched in our crater. Worst of all, he didn’t have just one spider bot on his tale, there were three of them, and their tiny churning silver legs were a blur of motion.

  “Shoot that thing down!” I roared. “Take out the legs!”

  Lasers blazed and spat. At the same moment, a group of Macros nosed up from the roof of the factory itself. They’d taken their time to sneak up there, no doubt climbing the back of the factory while we were congratulating ourselves on how smart we were. Now, they crawled forward on their metal bellies and directed their nose-guns down into the pit of scrambling marines.

  The Macro charging us went down, and a second later, all the bots detonated. A fountain of dirt clods showered my troops. It had been close.

  Laser fire peppered my men. The next thirty seconds were grim. We went from an easy victory deep into the jaws of defeat. Two of my men were out of the fight, putting us at eight effectives. Marvin was our medic now, as the corpsman had been killed. He sat in the dusty hole in the midst of us, doing what he could for the wounded.

  “Marvin!” I shouted. “Send five spider-bots to the roof. Take out those snipers, now!”

  “Message sent.”

  “Sir, we are being charged from all sides!” Kwon shouted.

  I swiveled my head this way and that. The Macros were veering in from every direction. “Where did they all come from?”

  “I saw them pop out of tunnels out there, trenches in the dirt.”

  I watched as more came up and did the same.

  “Marvin, reprogram the spider-bots,” I said. “Tell them not to come within ten yards of any marine.”

  “Unable to comply,” Marvin said with maddening calm.

  “Why not?”

  “They are almost on us,” Sloan said. He was crouched on the line with the rest of us, firing for all he was worth. Each Macro that we disabled was quickly caught and blown up, but there were too many and they were seconds from overrunning us. If just one of those spider-bots…

  “The spider-bots have limited sensory equipment, sir,” Marvin explained. “I made several design edits to provide much needed space for-”

  “I don’t care,” I shouted. “Just tell them all to blow themselves up! Right now!”

  “Message sent.”

  Explosions blossomed and thundered from every direction. A fresh shower of metal parts, dirt and slag came down on us. Even as we ducked and wiped at our visors, the surviving Macro workers hit our lines.

  It was the first hand-to-hand combat I’d been in for a while. If it hadn’t been for our powerful battle suits and our training, we might have been annihilated. As it was, we struggled with the mass of thrashing Macros, slamming our laser projectors against their joints and thoraxes, even as they sought to chew through our suits. Only one marine was torn apart, screeching. The rest of us lived. We used the smoking hulks of Macro corpses to form a barrier encircling our crater.

  Everyone was tired-almost exhausted. We quietly took up firing positions and waited for the next onslaught. I worked on programming the next batch of spider-bots. The rest of the men were doubtful about the wisdom of producing any more of them.

  But I kept at it. The Macros had turned the bots against us, but we’d survived. If I tweaked the design, I was sure they could still be useful.

  The Macros had stopped coming, but we all felt sure they were out there, coming up with another sly move. We watched every inch of ground with intense, unblinking stares.

  When something finally did happen, it was two minutes before the next spider-bot batch was ready.

  “I see movement at the edge of dome, Colonel,” Sloan said. “We have new entries-lots of them coming through now.”

  I cursed. “Reinforcements? How many?”

  “I–I can’t even count them. They are coming through from every direction at once.”

  “What kind of Macros? Do they have lasers?”

  “I can’t tell. They are still blurred as they come through the field. Should we fire?”

  I had reached the top of the crater now, and crouched beside Sloan. I knew a sick feeling as I saw what he saw. There were hundreds of shimmering images, coming through the field. They flared white as they pressed against the bubble of force. A few more steps, and they’d be through.

  “Hold on, don’t waste power,” I told Sloan. “You can’t hurt them until they are through the field entirely.”

  Then I heard a voice in my helmet. “Colonel Riggs?” the voice asked. “This is Captain Miklos. Are you here, sir?”

  “Stand down, marines!” I shouted. “They’re ours!”

  A ragged cheer went up from the survivors. As the marines kept coming, we stood up and watched. Men in battle suits led the way, then Centaurs followed. There had to be at least a thousand of them.

  I’d expected a brief firefight as my men arrived, but there was very little action. Captain Miklos soon found me, and we stood around the crater we’d called home for so long. By that time, it was obvious we’d wiped out the last of the Macros when they’d made their final charge to destroy us with our own spider-bots.

  “Looks like you had quite a party here, Colonel,” Miklos said.

  “We did indeed.”

  “I’m sorry to have taken so long. A back-up invasion was not part of the original plan.”

  “I know,” I told him. “I’m not blaming you. This entire operation didn’t go as planned. But we did capture the production unit.”

  “Does it still work?” he asked doubtfully.

  Together we surveyed the machine. It was the prize for which so many had sacrificed so much. “Yes, it appears to be sound.”

  I explained about the spider-bots, and the tank, and the steel-planks we’d built with this amazing machine.

  Miklos flipped up his visor and stared at it. “A wondrous machine. So much power. What are you going to do with this monster, Colonel? This has to be more production output than Earth has ever had.”

  I nodded. “I have plans, Captain. I have lots of plans.”

  Miklos laughed. “I should be happy to hear that sir-but somehow, I’m not.”

  — 21

  The battle for the production facility on had not gone smoothly, but at least we’d won. We’d captured the machine, and already my eyes were on the next goal: the third and final Macro dome. I wanted it badly. After I’d seen what one machine could produce, I wanted these factories more than ever now.

  My reasoning was simple in the extreme: with a combined set of Nano factories and Macro factories-several of each-I could build more hardware than we’d ever seen before. I could make new things no one had even thought of yet. They would be big, smart, and flexible-but mostly big. My dream of a battle station on Hel could quickly become a reality. I sternly reminded myself I still had six planets to liberate, and they weren’t going to do it on their own.

  After Miklos had set up a perimeter around the huge pit, I felt less confident. A few thousand troops looked pretty thin when stretched around in a ten mile circle. I immediately improved our numbers by creating my own Macro workers. These looked exactly like normal Macros, but they were enslaved to our programming, and could not be used for military purposes.

  “I don’t like these things, sir,” Sloan complained to me, sneering at the first twenty or so I’d produced. “Do we really have to have them? I feel like I’m consorting with the enemy.”

  “I’m done building them for now,” I told him. “We had to have them to bring raw supplies to the Macro factory. I
want this monster to keep churning out new equipment. But I don’t blame you for disliking the look of these machines. In fact, I’m putting you in charge of making them more friendly.”

  “Uh, I’m no programmer, sir.”

  “Not required. Order a load of paint to be brought down from our ship’s stores. Coat these things thickly, and then put them back to work. It doesn’t have to be art. A typical marine paint-job will do.”

  “You want me to paint them, sir? Why?”

  I looked at him for a second. I didn’t like my orders being questioned several times in a row.

  “Sorry sir,” he said, catching my look. “I suppose the paint is intended to allow us to identify them as friendly. What color do you want them to be?”

  “Whatever you want,” I told him. “But not pink. I hate pink.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, sir,” he murmured, then walked away to order the paint.

  Once I was given a chance to think clearly, I changed the big factory’s production orders. With Marvin’s help, I ordered six thousand Centaur infantry kits to be produced. Then I had the Fleet destroyers bring down fresh troops. We had no lack of native volunteers, but we never had enough equipment to give them. I meant to change that.

  Once the factory was humming, all my marines were dug into defensive positions, and the ships were bringing down loads of fresh troops every hour, I had time to ponder my next move. The Macros had remained quiet as we consolidated around our captured prize, and that worried me. They’d never cooperated previously, so I didn’t expect them to give up so easily. They were out there, planning and building something.

  The new worker machines were very effective at gathering elements from the stockpiles that had been made all around the factory. The infantry kits were being produced in large batches, more than a hundred at a time. Smiling, I ordered ten thousand more.

  After that, I decided to build tanks. I’d always wanted to build heavier armor units, but had never had the required levels of production to sustain it. Now, I had a system that could chunk out steel like-well, like a factory. I ordered up a platoon of tanks, sixteen in all. After a few design changes, the two-turret monsters were more functional than the prototype I’d built under the dome. Producing about one an hour at a steady rate, intermixed with more loads of infantry kits, I soon had quite an army.