Battle Station (15 page)

“There are few certainties. I have suspicions, which I’m trying to verify. In time, I will make a full report.”

“In time, we’ll all be dead—even you, Marvin. Talk to me now, before this team goes another step deeper into this hellhole. You tell me what you are holding back. What is it you don’t want us to know?”

Marvin had a camera on everyone in the team now. The rain still drizzled over our suits. His electric eyes focused and zoomed independently. I knew he was taking a reading of our collective mood. Apparently, he didn’t like what he saw, because he swung most of his cameras back to me and finally answered.

“The cloud ahead is biotic in nature. It is a life form, I believe. A mass made of many small parts. In a way, it is similar to a nanite formation.”

My helmet swiveled back toward the shifting darkness. It looked like thick smoke, but I supposed it could be more of a giant, gaseous jellyfish. “You’re telling me that thing is alive? It’s huge. Is it solid, liquid or gas?”

“None of those. It is more like a living plasma, or a living gel. Part gaseous, part liquid. Very little of it could be called a solid.”

Sloan lifted a gauntlet and pointed at the robot. “I have it!” he said. “It’s a mass of those microbes, the ones we found back on the Macro cruiser. Is that it, Marvin?”

“Good question,” I said, giving Sloan a nod.

“No,” Marvin said.

We all looked at him, but he didn’t volunteer anything more.

“Well?” I demanded. “Then what is it? If you want to press ahead with this mission, you’d better keep talking.”

“It’s a single organism, not a mass made up of a trillion individual cells.”

I grunted unhappily. Far from being like robots in old movies, Marvin was a tight-lipped miser with information, rather than a mechanical blabbermouth. “Okay, what the heck is it doing squatting at the bottom of this hole?”

“It is imprisoned here.”

I nodded. “Fine. Is there a Macro dome down there with it? Or was all that talk of a production facility in this location a trick to get us to come here?”

Marvin hesitated. “I don’t know.”

Half the men in the squad groaned aloud. Marvin swung his cameras from face to face.

“All right,” I said. “I apologize, everyone. Marvin, you are fired. When I get you off this world, I’m putting you into a hold on the Centaur stations where you can’t do any more harm.”

I pulled out my com-link and activated it.

Marvin slithered closer and a cluster of his cameras studied me. “What are you doing, Colonel Riggs?”

“What does it look like? I’m calling Fleet.”

“But we were to maintain long-range radio silence.”

“Not anymore. We are pulling out. I’m calling for our extraction from this garden spot you lured us into. Unless you give me a good reason to do otherwise, right now.”

“The Macro factory is probably down there. I calculate a sixty-two percent probability.”

“Sixty-two percent?” I asked. “That sucks, Marvin. That’s almost a coin-toss.”

“It’s closer to two out of three.”

I shook my head. “No, there is no ‘probability’. The factory is either down there, or it isn’t. What is the basis for your argument? Why do you think it’s here and not at the bottom of some sea?”

“The mineral exhaust and regional harvesting machine activity levels are far higher than normal in this region.”

“That’s it?”

“Also, the prisoner would most likely be in close proximity to one of the Macro Superiors.”

“What prisoner, and what do mean by Macro Superior?”

“Super-brains, I believe you called them. AI intellects.”

“Right. No wonder you wanted to come here. Is it mating season?”

“I don’t understand your statements, Colonel Riggs. They seem to be non-sequiturs.”

“Never mind,” I said. “You think there is a massive alien prisoner, a Macro factory and a Macro Superior all down at the bottom of this hole? When did you first suspect this?”

“As soon as I examined satellite imagery of the location.”

I sighed. This was often how it went with Marvin. He was deceptive and manipulative, but when you finally forced answers out of him, he gave them all at once. Somehow, that made it harder to be angry with him. His full confessions seemed to absolve him of his sins.

“All right. Where does this giant gelatinous being come from?”

“It is a one of the race-members of the species you most commonly refer to as ‘the Blues’.”

If I had possessed ten cameras of my own, I would have put them all on Marvin. Every trooper around us stared in shock. They all knew about the Blues, the theoretical race of beings we’d yet to find. They were the ones who’d let the Nanos and the Macros loose on the rest of us poor, unsuspecting biotic slobs.

“But that cloud isn’t blue,” Kwon complained. “It’s black.”

I walked to the edge of the second cliff and stared down at the shifting, translucent mass. It had to be huge—a mile across at least. Could such a thing be alive, even intelligent? I thought about what kind of life form might be able to survive on a gas giant world. I supposed it could be something like this—a massive volume of aerogel. It wouldn’t have enough mass to be crushed by the overwhelming gravity of the world. In a way, I supposed the Blues had to be something of very low density, or very high density. Our kind could not take the brutal G-forces.

“What are we going to do, Colonel?” Kwon asked.

I sighed and directed my laser projector toward the mass. “We are going down, First Sergeant. We are going to find out exactly what is at the bottom of this very odd hole.”

-15-

When we slid down the fourth cliff of the massive pit, we ran into trouble. I supposed it was bound to happen eventually. All the military Macros nearby were focused on my diversionary destroyers, but there were workers and the like that kept plodding along, performing their mundane duties. It was one of these machines that discovered us.

A heavy earth-mover came along the road at a surprisingly fast clip. It was on its way down from the top, spiraling to the bottom along the endless roadway. It ran on treads, and was made in sections like a caterpillar of burnished metal. The machine made such a racket that we could hardly hear ourselves screaming inside our own helmets.

“Move out!” I shouted, making the hand signal to advance. I was pointing in the general direction of the next cliff-edge—I swear I was. But Kwon didn’t take it that way.

“What?” he asked. His voice was so naturally loud, I could hear him clearly. “Ah yes, sir, attack!”

And that was it. A single misunderstanding was all it took. It was just the sort of misunderstanding Kwon wanted to make, of course. He could hardly stomach leaving one of these machines in a functional state. Sneaking around simply wasn’t his style.

After the first laserbolts splattered on its front plates and knocked out some of its sensors, there wasn’t any way to change the situation. The earth-mover was running us down so fast we didn’t have time to get organized. I knew it would have immediately radioed Macro Command about the incident. At that point, the damage was done. We had been noticed, and the enemy wasn’t going to forget about us when we were this close to a sensitive base.

I joined in with the rest of my marines, firing and scrambling to the sides of the road. I saw my men were planning to allow the machine to run through middle of them—but it suddenly swerved toward the wall. My men were trapped there, between the barreling mass of the earth-mover and the hundred-foot high wall of sludge. They then did what they’d been trained to do: they engaged their repellers and shot up into the air, avoiding death.

Great,
I thought. We’d just provided the enemy with new, distinctive emissions signatures. This single action would mark us clearly as Star Force Marines, if this Macro Superior knew its opponents. I figured that it probably did.

“Concentrate fire!” roared Kwon, “take out the outside treads!”

A dozen beams leapt out. Every man carried a heavy gun and the output was startling. The treads were quickly blown apart. Mud, metal shrapnel and superheated steam went everywhere.

The entire vehicle slewed suddenly toward the cliff. It had been rubbing up against the inner wall to crush us, but now that the other side was dragging, it did a rapid, lurching turn in that direction. The destroyed treads made the motion uncontrollable. A second later, it flew off the edge and overturned, crashing down deeper into the pit. We glided to the edge and looked down after it. Rolling over and over, it almost vanished into the deepening haze. Secondary explosions plumed up with flame and vapors. The thing finally came to a hissing stop three levels farther down.

“Well,” I said, “That’s pretty much that. Let’s fly the rest of the way down. We’re not fooling anyone now.”

Kwon shot past me, needing no more encouragement. He flew like cannonball downslope. I took off after him, and even Marvin fully-engaged his repellers, bringing up the rear of the formation. We hadn’t taken any casualties—yet. I made a mental note to point that out later to the survivors. I’d gotten them pretty far into this monster’s mouth before it woke up and started chewing on us—and technically, that wasn’t my fault.

Now that we were flying rather than trotting, we move dramatically faster. The stair-like spiraling levels went by under us, and the sky itself grew darker. I had a sensation of making a very vague contact with something—this stuff, this smoke-like gel, it was incredibly nebulous, but I could tell I was touching
something
. The sensation was like putting one’s hand into a mass of bubbles in bubble-bath—but even less substantial than that. Could I really be
inside
one of the Blues? The thought was disturbing.

I received a contact then, a tone in my helmet that indicated a private channel was being requested. I saw it was from Marvin, and decided to ignore it. If he wanted to stop and examine another mud puddle, he could do it on his own time. Right now, I wasn’t in the mood.

“Kwon, get this bee-swarm into a formation. I want four up front on point, with two back up fireteams on either flank. I’ll back up the center with the rest of them.”

Kwon relayed my orders, and the marines shuffled around into a more organized arrangement. We resembled a Macro diamond-formation, with a fireteam flying along at each of the four points. As we flew, we quickly passed over another earth-mover, then a third. These machines took notice of us and moved to intercept, but they were too slow. We flashed past them and flew deeper still.

The sky overhead became ever darker. Soon, we would need our suit lights just to see in the murk. Something up ahead caught my eye then, a glimmer of brightness in this sea of gloom. Could that be the dome?

The connection request tone sounded in my helmet again. It was Marvin again, making another attempt. I opened the channel.

“What is it?”

“Colonel Riggs,” Marvin began, “the entity has made repeated attempts to communicate, and I’m not sure if I can put it off any longer. It may become offended.”

“The entity? What entity?”

“The designation it uses for self-identification corresponds to the concept of
Introspection
.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Marvin?” I demanded.

“The Blues use such concepts for identification, rather than a traditional name.”

I paused, finally catching on. “Are you telling me this big pile of smoke we’re flying into wants to talk to us?”

“It is curious about the nature of this new intrusion. We are disturbing it—literally. Saying it wishes to talk might be an overstatement of the situation. It questions our intentions and our natures. It wishes to experience us.”

I thought for a second, but not for a long one. I didn’t have a long second right now. I could sort of see its point of view. From its perspective, we were like ants running around on a man’s shoe: vaguely interesting. But we weren’t just ants, because we were
inside
this giant being, stirring up its guts. Maybe we were causing it pain.

Under different circumstances, I would have apologized, halted our advanced and sat down to have a good, old-fashioned heart-to-heart with this mammoth creature. But right now, I was on a mission and the lives of my entire team were in jeopardy.

“Tell it we can’t talk right now. We’ve come here in peace as far as it is concerned. We mean it no harm, but we are in combat with the Macros. They are our enemies.”

Marvin hesitated, and I assumed incorrectly that he was relaying my message. “Are you sure you wish to communicate these concepts, Colonel Riggs?” he asked.

“Yes, dammit. Why not?”

“What if the creature is in league with the Macros?”

“I thought you told me it was a prisoner.”

“Yes. But have you considered why it would submit to such a status?”

“I don’t have time to debate that, Marvin. Transmit my message. That’s an order.”

There was a brief pause. “Message sent,” he said.

We reached the last cliff and slowed down. There still hadn’t been any Macro resistance. I looked down and ahead, seeing what could only be a Macro dome. It was a force field of surprising power. It repelled anything it didn’t approve of, I knew, up to and including artillery shells. The shield essentially halted fast-moving objects or energy emissions. In the past, we’d only managed to break these defensive systems in one of two ways. We’d either launched a number of nuclear explosives at them, overwhelming the shield, or we’d crept in slowly on foot. Today, we would have to try the latter approach.

“I don’t see any Macros,” I said. “Let’s advance.”

Before we’d gone another dozen feet, however, the situation changed dramatically. A howling wind rose up, and the world around us darkened.

“What the heck is this?” Kwon asked.

“I don’t know, maybe it will let up if we get into the dome.”

It didn’t let up. In fact, it grew in intensity. Soon, we could hardly see one another

“It’s this air—it’s like soup, sir!” Kwon said.

“Tighten up the formation! I want everyone in a group.”