Conquest (Star Force Series) Read online

  “Why the heavy armor?” Sandra asked. “Other than to stop incoming fire?”

  “The new equipment was too heavy otherwise,” I said. “It would work okay in zero-gee, but under acceleration or a high gravity planet it would be hard to move. So, this suit is different. It’s an exoskeleton.”

  “It makes you stronger?”

  “Much stronger.”

  Sandra stood back, cocking her head and smiling. “Arm-wrestle me,” she said.

  I snorted. “We don’t have time for—”

  “Come on, you said you wanted to test the suit.”

  “Okay, here,” I said, squatting down on a stool beside a steel table. We’d finally upgraded our furniture to withstand our gross body-weights. The stool sagged under me all the same. I wondered if we would have to upgrade everything again.

  “If you pull my arm off, you have to take me to the infirmary to put it back on again,” Sandra said, looking worriedly at the claw I put up in front of her.

  “I’ll be careful,” I said. “No squeezing your hand. I’ll just use lateral force.”

  “Okay.”

  We must have been a strange sight, this hulking robotic monster sitting across from a girl that couldn’t have been more than a tenth my weight—if that much. She reached up and took my humming arm.

  “Your suit vibrates in my hand,” she complained. “It feels funny.”

  “That’s the exoskeleton. Ready?”

  “Why not?”

  I locked my arm, but didn’t move it. She pushed. I felt the feedback, but it was nothing like the force she was applying. I let her cheat, standing up half-way for leverage and using her legs.

  “Ready?” I said, pretending I couldn’t feel her shoving and grunting.

  “You bastard. I can’t move that arm. I don’t think I weigh enough.”

  Sandra had fantastic strength for her weight, but she wasn’t really stronger than the average nanotized marine. What made her deadly was her speed and accuracy. The microbes had rebuilt her with high-performance in mind.

  I suddenly made a sweeping, lateral motion with my arm, twisting at the waist. Sandra made a whooping sound and flew across the room. She caught herself, tumbled and came back up.

  “It’s not fair,” she said. “You’re a machine now. I might as well wrestle a tank.”

  I stood up, bumping the steel table. A heavy crease appeared at one corner. “Damn,” I said. “I’m going to have to be careful in this outfit.”

  “What else can it do?”

  “Come outside.”

  She followed me into the sunlight. Passing marines stared at me, and half the laser turrets swiveled to study me. I sweated for a moment. I was a new classification of contact to them—and possibly hostile. More turrets swung to cover me. I froze in place.

  “Unit Six,” I radioed back to the shed behind me. “Transfer the configuration and recognition patterns for the new prototype battle suit to all laser turrets. Mark as friendly. Do it now.”

  “Done.”

  After a few more seconds, the lasers relaxed and went back to scanning the skies and tracking birds in the trees.

  “That was close, Kyle,” Sandra said at my side.

  “Yeah. I forgot.”

  Inside the suit, I stood motionless for a moment. I was trying to figure out how to control the new system for my next test. I’d built this prototype unit with the same Heads Up Display we used in our regular battle armor, but for some reason it wasn’t responding.

  “What are all these lights and lines for?” Sandra asked, walking around me in a circle. She traced various LEDs on the exoskeleton with her fingers.

  “You need light in space,” I explained. “Both for identification and just to see. I can change the colors too, like this….”

  The lights running over the suit changed from a soft blue to a soft green.

  “Oh no,” she said, “change it back. I like blue better.”

  I tapped through the color palette back to blue.

  “How will you tell one another apart in these things?” she asked. “I think the colors should mean something. How about rank?”

  “Good idea.”

  “Blue for officers,” she said. “I only want to see you in blue.”

  I laughed. “And the other ranks?”

  “Red for most marines. Green for non-coms.”

  “All right,” I said, liking her ideas. It would make the identification of my people easier in combat. I hoped the Macros wouldn’t figure out they should shoot the guys who were lit up in blue—but I didn’t worry too much. They didn’t seem like they were overly interested in colors and insignia. I didn’t think they really understood or cared about our command structure, which was very different from their own. Macro Command was a parallel-processing wireless network that consisted of every Macro in the region. They probably had no idea some of us were giving the orders while others followed them. In their social systems, everyone participated and instantly came to the same conclusion as to their next tactical move. In a sense, they were the ultimate egalitarians.

  Sandra stepped back suddenly, looking up at me and smiling. “Okay,” she said. “Enough fooling around. Let’s see what this thing can do. Impress me—but don’t get yourself killed.”

  I’d planned to work up to flight, but thought that now was as good a time as any to try it out. One of the major design goals for these suits was improved movement. Using the exoskeleton for dramatic leaps was only part of it. This battle suit had its own propulsion system. I’d placed propulsion disks in the feet and arms. The disks were miniature versions of the flying dishes my marines had rode into combat while boarding ships during the long flight home. With four smaller units, I hope to provide greater stability and more fluid maneuvering.

  “Here it goes,” I said, and applied thrust. It took a bit more than I thought it would, but after a moment of trembling, I was airborne. I rose up over the base, slowly applying more thrust.

  Again, I caught the attention of the laser turrets. They snapped their projectors around to sight on me like a flock of suspicious cranes. They slowly turned away, however, as I hovered there in the middle of the base. I was only using the two bottom propulsion units, the ones on my feet. I could feel them vibrate there, tickling my toes slightly.

  “Wow!” Sandra called, clapping her hands. “I didn’t expect that. Go higher. How high can you go? Can you reach space?”

  “No,” I radioed down. “In zero-gee, I doubt I could reach escape velocity, but I could maneuver freely in orbit. In an atmosphere with Earth-level gravity, I suppose I could fly around above treetop level indefinitely.”

  “You should come down here and carry me. Like Superman.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe later, after a bit more testing.”

  “We’ll be dead by then,” she said, pouting.

  “Maybe.”

  I landed then, and tried running in the suit. Oddly, that was harder to manage than flying. Getting the rhythm right, pumping my legs up and down in the correct pattern at the correct time was difficult. I headed out to the forest and immediately ran into a tree. Bark chipped off showing the orange-white flesh of the tree. Soon after I stepped into holes and went tumbling. The test was a general failure. I could see the suit was going to take some getting used to. The problem was my natural body movements weren’t quite in tune with the weight and mass I was trying to move now. I had the strength, but it was as if I’d gained a thousand pounds and a lot of muscle. It was all about the timing.

  Another major issue was the isolation and lack of tactile feedback. When running, the human body gives the brain input from our feet and limbs as to where they are in relationship to the ground. With this suit on—well, it was like trying to cut your toenails with oven mitts on. There were lots of accidents.

  Sandra glided after me as I trotted around among the trees. When I fell, she helped me back up. After an hour or so, I was doing better. At least I wasn’t falling on my face and bumpin
g into things all the time.

  Sandra banged her fist on my metal-coated shoulder blade. I didn’t really feel it, but I heard it.

  I turned smoothly to face her. “What?”

  “Let’s shoot something,” she said. “I know you would never build a monstrosity like this if it couldn’t kill a Macro.”

  “Have you got autoshades?” I asked.

  She smiled and I watched as her eyes darkened. I’d forgotten about that. She’d had them built in. A nice trick. Maybe I could train my nanites to do that.

  I turned back and aimed forward. I extended a gloved fist. Inside the arms, I’d build laser projectors. I burned down a tall palm with a single blazing emission and a slashing motion. The palm toppled over, the fronds at the top fluttering wildly as it fell. Birds screamed protests at us.

  “You have two lasers?” she asked. “One in each arm?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re twice the man I thought you were.”

  “So are you.”

  Sandra gave me an odd look, not sure if she had been insulted or not. Fortunately, she couldn’t see my grin due to the glare on my faceplate.

  -11-

  A few days later I had all thirty one of my factories producing improved models of my new battle suit. The suits took about three hours to produce, but they didn’t take much in the way of specialized materials. After two steady days of production, I had about five hundred of these specialized suits. I’d already taken volunteer marines and set up specialized crash-training courses.

  Crow came to watch me lead a company out on the beach a mile or so south of Fort Pierre. He stood on the beach with his arms crossed as we flew over the waves, shot hot lasers into the ocean and practiced diving through the resulting plumes of steam.

  Finally, Crow signaled me impatiently. I ordered Kwon, who was assisting me in the training, to continue to lead the troops through maneuver and fire exercises. After that, they were to run ten miles through hip deep water and back again through the forest.

  I landed near Crow with a spray of sand. He wore black-out goggles that clashed with his sunburned skin.

  “What’s up, Jack?” I asked him. “News from Venus?”

  “Nothing, I’m glad to report. But I’m here to find out what the hell you are up to.”

  I waved back with one clanking arm toward the company flying over the ocean. As I did so, two of my men slammed together and went into spins. One shot down into the ocean, causing a fountain of steaming water to shoot upward. The second caught himself and managed to keep flying.

  “Good work, marine!” I roared the winner over the com-link. “Now, pull your buddy out of the surf. Tell him he owes you a beer.”

  I turned back to Crow. “I’m training these men to use their new suits. They are tricky to control, especially while in flight, as you can see. The key is to get a feel for the suit as an extension of your own body. To be the suit, so to speak. It’s rather like learning exactly where the bumper of your car is even when you can’t see it.”

  “Are you expecting to go up there and parallel park with the Macros?”

  “No, sir. I’m expecting to destroy the enemy.”

  “With this lot? With a pack of marines in medieval armor? Have you gone mad, Kyle? I expected you to use our destroyer design to manufacture a dozen new destroyers for me.”

  I removed my helmet and shook my head. Sweat flew in a spiraling spray. The heat-dissipation units inside these things needed a little work. I hadn’t turned on my air-conditioners yet, I didn’t think I should have to given that we were only working in the tropics. Space—especially any region of space closer to the sun than Earth—was going to be a lot hotter than this beach. But I’d thought wrong. The exoskeletons created excess heat as they moved, probably due to unforeseen friction and the use of servos.

  “I forget you weren’t out there on our campaign,” I told Crow.

  He stiffened his expression immediately. I knew he took any reference to his absence on my last big mission as some kind of suggestion of cowardice on his part. That didn’t bother me, so I kept on making the references.

  “Just tell me why this isn’t a gross waste of time and resources.”

  “Don’t think about them as marines, Jack,” I said. “Think of them as one-man fighters. And think of your destroyers as carriers for these fighters.”

  He tilted his head, looking at me. “You plan to attack the Macros with infantry?”

  “You saw me do it when that diamond of four Macros hit Earth a few weeks ago.”

  “I’d thought that was a wild act of desperation.”

  “No…it was a tactic. And a damned effective one, too. These Macro cruisers aren’t well designed to stop boarders. They have only one single large cannon and a number of missile ports with a limited supply of missile salvoes. They can’t easily deal with large numbers of small attackers.”

  Crow nodded. I could tell I had him thinking, but he still doubted me. “Still sounds to me like an excuse to build up your marine forces when it’s obvious we need every ship I can get.”

  “Every one of these suits is a ship. A very small one, but I already have five hundred of them. I’m training the pilots right now, as you can see.”

  I gestured with a sweeping arm out to the frolicking marines. They were doing stabilization maneuvers now. These consisted of one marine flying laterally, then being struck or spun around by other marines. He was to steady himself and get to his goal point as quickly as possible without touching the waves. The mission of the rest of each squad was to dunk the man running the gauntlet. There was surge of hooting and roaring laughter each time a man spun out of control and slammed into the ocean.

  “You are putting these clowns on my destroyers?” Crow asked. “I’ve got them set up for a crew of six, just as our design required originally. One helmsman working with the brainbox to maneuver the ship. One communications officer to coordinate with the rest of the fleet and a squad of supporting frigate-class vessels. Add three gunners and a commander, and you have all the crewmembers the ship is built to hold.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “You forget I helped come up with the design, Jack. We don’t need three gunners, first of all. The original design was to allow each of the three guns to target three different enemies and engage them at once. I now reject that operational theory. These enemy ships are all larger than our vessels. We will have to put dozens of lasers on one cruiser to bring it down. We only need one gunner per ship.”

  Crow shrugged, conceding my point. “All right, a crew of four then.”

  “Three,” I said. The commander and the communications officer are redundant. The small ships get by with two men each now, we only need three to run one of the bigger destroyers. In truth, we’ll probably have them all link up under a single commander to combine their firepower without any operational delay relaying orders from ship-to-ship.”

  He glanced at me unhappily. “You’ll make a lot of Fleet people unhappy if you don’t let them fly.”

  “Too bad. When we have a large enough number of ships, they’ll get their chance.”

  “So, I gather you want to fill the other spots aboard with your trapeze artists, here?”

  “Yes. More than that, I plan to put troop pods with small platoons on every vessel. Sixteen total marines in battle armor. They’ll greatly increase the firepower of your destroyers.”

  Crow sniggered at that. “How the hell do you get around to believing that?”

  I keyed my headset. “First Sergeant Kwon.”

  One of the marines out blazing over the waves slowed and lifted himself above the rest. His suit ran with green lights and glowing LED lines. His suit was easily the largest one out there.

  “Here, sir,” Kwon said.

  “I want a live-fire exercise. Drop a grenade on its lowest yield setting one mile east. Put it down in the water, set to go off on contact with the bottom. Move like its real, First Sergeant. ‘Cause it is.”

  “This i
s a live-fire exercise!” Kwon roared without a moment’s hesitation. “Code November! I repeat, code November!”

  My helmet suddenly buzzed with a cacophony of voices. Everyone was shouting at once. Most of the marines whirled around and headed for the shore. Most of the company wore suits with red streaming lights, designating them as grunts. The green-lit non-coms and the few blue-lit officers hung back, plucking floundering men out of the waves. Some were airlifted by two or more others, dragged out of the water and up onto the beach.

  “What the hell are you up to, Kyle?”

  “Just watch,” I said.

  About a minute after the last man was out of the water, the flash came. The black outline of a single marine battle suit came tumbling through the air back toward us. The flashed loomed and grew behind him. It was brilliant even by the standards of men accustomed to high-powered laser fire.

  When Kwon returned to the beach, there was a lot of cheering and back-slapping. After a blast of wind howled by, Crow walked down to the waves and stared at the swelling mushroom cloud. A fountain of steam a thousand feet high ballooned out at the bottom ocean.

  When we could talk again, Crow turned to me. “You really are a crazy son-of-a-bitch, Riggs. Isn’t there some kind of international law about tests like that in water? What have you got against fish, mate?”

  “Not really keen on the taste,” I said. “But I had to test the new grenades at some point. They are like our mines, but designed for the purpose of rupturing a cruiser hull with a single strike. We learned a lot aboard those cruisers, and one thing I’ve got down to a science is the amount of force it takes to dig through one of those hulls. Every one of my shipboard assault troops will carry one of these specialized grenades. If even one of them gets close to a cruiser—boom.”

  Crow took off his goggles and squinted at me a new air of respect. Either that, or he thought I was insane.

  -12-