Annihilation (Star Force Series) (25 page)

I shouted over the command channel, giving the go-ahead to fly again. The men barely needed to hear the order. They were already lifting off in droves and zooming forward. The longer we were on this open beach, the worse it was going to be.

The streams of bullets were different than normal automatic weapon fire back on Earth. First of all, there were no tracers. I supposed the machines didn’t need to light up every fourth round with an incendiary just to see what they were aiming at. Due to my sensory gear, I could still see the incoming streaks of hot lead.

The bullets were different in other ways as well, I soon realized. They were bigger, being about the size of felt pens. About four inches long and more than half an inch thick, these rounds struck with real force.

Ten rounds hit my armor in a burst as a hosing spray swept near at chest-level. A normal man would have been cut in two.

Fortunately, my armor didn’t even rupture. But the kinetic force was such that I was tossed back and thrown onto my can. I couldn’t believe it. Nothing less than a Macro’s leg should have knocked me down in this power-suit.

“Major Sloan? Are you reading me?” I asked over the unit channel.

“Here sir.”

“We’ve got to get to those nests and take them out, now!”

“I’m well aware, Colonel. We’ve got casualties.”

I jumped up and rushed forward. I was very conscious of the fact that my chest-armor had been seriously damaged. Another hard hit like that might punch through. Even with all my modifications, I didn’t think I would survive it.

“Should we use grenade-launchers, sir?” Sloan asked.

The grenade launchers Sloan was talking about weren’t old-fashioned, under-barrel units like the American M203. When we fired a grenade, we fired a small tactical nuke at the enemy.

“The ridge is too close,” I said, “and I don’t want to expend that kind of ammo on this position. Permission denied.”

“I’m putting a sharpshooter squad on every pillbox then,” Sloan said. “Maybe we can get a lucky hit.”

“Good idea. Right now, I’m wishing we had brought along some heavy weaponry.”

“We could call for air support, sir.”

“Forget it. By the time they got down here, this will be over with and I don’t want them exposed to enemy AA until we know what we’re up against.”

“Roger that.”

Now, from our advancing lines, counter-fire was being thrown back at the enemy. As far as I could tell, this had little or no effect.

We charged onward. It seemed to take forever, but really it was probably less than a minute before the first elements of the Fourth reached the ridge. That’s when the enemy really let us have it.

Up until we got close, the enemy guns had been spraying at all of us, like someone with a broom trying to push away dust. When that didn’t work and we got in dangerously close, the automated guns changed tactics. They chose an unlucky marine at the front of the charge and hammered him until he went down. Then they kept hammering him.

I wasn’t at the very front wave, but I was within a hundred yards of the brave men who were. I watched as a dozen of them went down, being shot to death by a thousand orange sparking rounds. The men fell, struggled, fell again. There was nothing we could do for them, and their suits kept them alive for several ghastly seconds.

Even after they’d stopped moving, the streams of bullets poured into dead marines. The beach ran red and flesh flew after the shell-like armor was finally breached. When the guns were satisfied, they traversed their turrets to the next victim.

Then, at last, we reached the ridgeline. It’s hard to describe how you feel at a moment like this, when you finally get to sate your urge for revenge on your tormentors. I guess attackers who’ve suffered losses and abuse during a long charge have felt the emotion since time immemorial.

We roared and strained, grappling the machines, burning them. They weren’t easy to take out. Guns operated by humans were relatively simple to destroy—the key was that the human soldiers firing the guns were softer than the guns themselves. But in this case, there were no soldiers. Just the heartless guns, chattering away relentlessly. We had to destroy them in detail, ripping barrels from tripods, stripping away snaking belts of ammo and burning smoking holes into their CPUs.

Finally, it was over. While the Fourth spread out on the ridge, seeking cover and checking on the wounded, I went to find Major Sloan.

He was just coming up from the beach when I met him on the ridge. I gave him a single raised eyebrow. He was practically the last man to reach the ridgeline.

“I was with one of the sharpshooter teams, sir,” he reported. “Negligible effects.”

“I noticed. How many casualties?”

“Fourteen dead, six wounded.”

An alarming statistic. Normally, my men were very hard to kill. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have two hundred wounded and no deaths after a hard fight, due to our individual survivability.

I frowned. “I guess the enemy tactics of overkill worked for them in this instance. The machines didn’t stop us, but they made us bleed.”

“Agreed,” Sloan said. “Your orders, sir?”

“Request rescue for the wounded. The rest will pack up and advance.”

Sloan looked westward at the dark hills. Ahead of us a series of ridges loomed, separated by flat, rocky terrain.

“There could be a large number of ambushes ahead, sir,” Sloan said. “Maybe we should scout first.”

“Excellent idea, Major!” I said.

I walked forward and clamped my arm around his shoulders. His helmet swiveled to regard me. I couldn’t see his expression through the dark plexiglass, but I could bet it wasn’t a happy one.

“I’ve got just the man for the job,” I said, giving him a little shake.

“Are you sending me on point, sir? I’m a major.”

I laughed. “No. I’m just screwing with you, Sloan. I can’t afford to lose my unit commander. I’m sending Captain Gaines and his team of toughs.”

“An excellent suggestion, Colonel,” Sloan said, brightening. He trotted away to relay the order.

A few minutes later, Captain Gaines showed up and asked to speak with me. I waved him to sit down. I was crouching with my back rubbing against a ferro-crete pillbox wall. I had a nanite sprayer out, which was working on repairing my armor with repeated light coats. I’d found that if you sprayed a thin coat several times on the damaged area, they seemed to work faster.

“Colonel, have you got a problem with me?” Captain Gaines asked.

I looked up at him.

“I do now,” I said.

“What do you mean, sir?”

“I like you Gaines. I have you down in my private book as an up-and-comer. But this is a bad moment in your personnel records as far as I’m concerned.”

Gaines shuffled uncertainly in his armor. Finally, he threw up his hands. “I just don’t get it, sir. First, you praise me and put me in charge of a company. Then you give me a series of hazardous duties, the latest of which seems to be tailor-made to get me killed.”

I shook my head and stood up. On my chest, a mass of nanites bubbled and worked to patch up my suit. It was sort of like watching acid eat at something—but in reverse.

“Captain, I’m going to give you a pass on this one, because you and I haven’t been in close contact before. Here’s the deal: I need officers who can do anything and everything I ask them to. I’m asking you to do one of a nasty mission right now. Are you requesting another assignment?”

“So, this is all some kind of test?”

“Not exactly. It is a test, but it’s also an opportunity. You can’t prove what you’re capable of if I don’t give you the chance to do so. Right here, right now, I’m giving you that chance.”

“I see.”

“I’ll ask again, do you want another assignment?”

Captain Gaines hesitated. Then he straightened his spine.

“No sir,” he said. “I’m taking this mission, and I’m going to complete it successfully.”

“Excellent! I knew I could count on you.”

He turned and trotted away to gather his hand-picked group of hard-eyed vets. I’d done a little checking up on Captain Gaines during my brief downtime before we’d crossed the sea from Big Island to Tango. He had a checkered past. He was one of those Star Force types that had joined us to get away from troubles back home. He’d been a gangster and had a rap sheet as long as my arm. But Star Force had given him a second chance, and the structure he seemed to need. I felt he’d excelled under my command. Now, it was time to see what he was really made of.

As he led his group of scouts off into the darkness, I sincerely hoped I’d see him again.

-21-

The first report back from Captain Gaines and his recon group came in less than an hour after we’d reached the beach. I’d decided not to sit around and was making headway up to Tango’s ridges. We were moving slowly, expecting an ambush at every twist in the land.

I felt we could afford the time. The three battalions at the bottom of the sea offshore weren’t drowning yet; they had another forty hours of air and supplies. Major Sloan and I decided they would do best by staying in position. If they could hit the island defenders from the front, while we were rolling up their flanks, we could destroy them in detail. Their trap would become our trap.

All these fancy ideas faded when Gaines called in and made his report.

“Colonel Riggs, we have problems,” he said.

“I can see by your locator you’re pretty far up the ridge, Gaines. Are you under fire?”

“No, sir. That’s the problem. I’m going from gun nest to gun nest. They’re all empty. The enemy has clearly been repositioning.”

I cursed quietly. “Where the hell are they?”

“Unknown, sir. They have plenty of those automated gun turrets, wherever they are. We’ve counted twenty-two empty gun sites.”

I was stunned. “You ran into twenty-two gun emplacements just while climbing the next ridge of the island? How many do they have at their stronghold?”

“I’m not sure they have a stronghold, sir.”

“Trust me, they do. Their tactics are clear. They saw us hitting their flank and reacted by sending out worker machines to withdraw their defensive systems from this side of the island. That means they’re building up a concentration, probably at the center of the T.”

“That makes sense, Colonel, but I can’t confirm any of it. I haven’t met up with a single active defensive system yet.”

“All right, keep going until you do. Riggs out.”

I turned to the mass of men trudging up the hillside all around me. “Sloan!” I roared. “Get them moving. There’s nothing to stop us for the next few miles. Let’s pick up the pace.”

Shouted orders rippled through the units. Soon, every knee joint was whining and rasping as armored legs moved faster. We stopped crawling over the land looking for an ambush at every turn and began trotting.

The power-suit batteries were in pretty good shape at this point. We’d designed the generators to be able to keep up with a light drain and still retain a full charge. A man could trot along for hours in them and never move the needle on his battery levels. But firing his weapon or flying would begin the inevitable drain.

Along the way uphill, I contacted the commanders of the battalions that were still sitting off the coast. I ordered them to ready themselves to advance onto the shores. Sloan trotted up next to me as I made these arrangements.

“I’ve done a little math, sir,” he said. “The Macros are very predictable, even for machines.”

“Tell me what you’ve figured out, Major,” I said encouragingly. Sloan was naturally laid-back—some may even say a lazy officer. But when he felt his safety and the safety of his unit was in question, he suddenly turned on the steam. He became a much more efficient officer in dangerous situations, which was partly why I kept placing him in harm’s way.

“They like to use predictable patterns for the spread of their resources, especially when they don’t have any critical basis on which to make their placement decisions. Basically, if they had ten square miles to cover and ten guns, they would place one on each square mile.”

I nodded. “So, you’re saying they probably covered the island with defensive systems evenly, up until now. When they realized they were under threat from two fronts, and their systems as placed weren’t enough to stop us, they rewrote their algorithm.”

“Exactly, sir. They’ll cluster them up on the top of the highest point, making it harder to take the entire island.”

“We pretty much knew that, Sloan.”

“Yes sir, but I’ve figured out how many weapons they have, based on the number found and the number of square miles covered.”

“Ah, okay,” I said, getting where he was going with this. “That’s good thinking, and might even be accurate. What did you come up with?”

“Two hundred and ninety guns, sir. That’s only if they withdrew all the guns from all three legs of the island.”

“Two hundred and ninety,” I said, thinking about it. I didn’t like the image that number conjured in my mind. It was grim, in fact. They would tear up my men.

“The number of guns a force faces does not cause a precisely incremental number of casualties to the attacking side,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”