Battle Station (39 page)

I took a deep breath and touched the hatchway that led into the troop pods. It dissolved, revealing a number of surprised-looking marines. They were playing cards, and they all froze for a second when they saw me. The moment of shock passed and they all jumped to their feet.

I walked inside and began shouting orders. Within four minutes, I had a squad ready to head out the hatches. I wished Kwon was with me, but he was still aboard Miklos’ ship. They’d all been warned about the things that might be lurking on their hulls. I suspected Kwon was knocking heads and leading a team outside to investigate by now, just as I was.

I’d taken just long enough to change out my generator unit and snap on a fresh helmet. I was glad they had spare equipment.
Goa
was so big there was plenty of storage space for such extras.

I pulled down a fresh helmet, heard the click and hiss of it locking into place, and smiled. The smell was different—very plastic and clean. In a way, I kind of liked it. After a moment the HUD activated and flashed all green bars. I was good to go.

“Okay men, I’ll take point. Follow me out onto the hull then spread out. Keep your magnetics on full when you walk out there, as we will be experiencing several Gs of acceleration.”

I climbed out the sally portal and was instantly struck by a wall of force. On my hands and knees, I dragged myself over the hull, heading aft toward the engines. It was like having a stiff tailwind that was so strong it almost knocked me over.

“On second thought,” I transmitted to my men, “don’t even try to stand up. Just stay low, and crawl like they do.”

I paused as I saw an unexpected result of my transmission. The things that had clustered around the base of the engine strut reacted to my words. They spread out, shuffling like crabs. There couldn’t be any doubt about it, they’d
heard
me.

About then, the engine they’d been messing with stuttered. Its output had been interrupted. The blue exhaust plume flashed on and off three times—then went out entirely.

The ship lurched under my hands. Since the engine had quit the other two were now out of balance. They were pushing the ship off-course.

“They’ve damaged engine number three,” a Staff Sergeant told me. “What should we do, sir?”

I glanced around me, about half the squad had come out to join me.

“Blast them,” I said.

The flashes began, and the enemy reacted in a predictable fashion: they fired back.

It had been a long time since I’d been in a firefight on the hull of moving ship. It was even less fun than I’d remembered. My guts were in a knot. There was no real cover out here, and we were at close range. Only the lurching of the ship was providing any distraction, screwing up everyone’s aim.

Overall, the crawlers seemed better at aiming under these conditions than we did. Within the first thirty seconds, two marines went twirling off into space. One was struggling with his repellers to return to the ship. The other was spinning and limp.

“Concentrate your fire!” I shouted. “Noncoms mark your targets. I want three beams on every crawler until it dies.”

We fried two of them, but then lost another marine. This one stayed clamped onto the hull. His magnetics still worked, but the rest of him flopped and waved with the G-forces like a flag in the wind.

“Call up squad two. Use the starboard sally port. We need more firepower!”

More men crawled around me. A bolt struck me in the shoulder. There was a gouge in my nice new helmet, too. I thought they must have hit an air tube, as the interior of my battle suit had a hot, melted plastic smell to it.

With better tactics and a wider spread of men, we began to drive them back. Our greatest advantage was our superior numbers. More marines kept coming out onto the hull, while the enemy’s number was finite.

Finally, they must have realized they weren’t going to win this one. As a group, they sprang up into space. I watched as they floated away quickly behind the ship. We all fired after them, but they were gone in a second and we hit nothing.

Crawling forward, we inspected the damaged engine and I ordered the men to repair what they could. If they could get the third engine running again, we’d be in a much better state to enter the next stage of the battle.

I was fortunate enough to discover something else other than twisted, blackened metal at the base of the engine mount. I found one of the enemy, with its crab-like feet caught in the hole they’d been burning into.

It was then that I finally realized what we were up against.

-39-

“They are Macros,” I said, dragging the crab-like corpse onto the command deck. I threw it down in the middle of the command staff. Its pointed feet rattled and clattered on the deck.

Sandra came close and knelt over it. “Disgusting.”

“No doubt about it. A new type of Macro. Something that crawls over the surface of our ships. Clearly, they were trying to break in or sabotage the ship. But what I can’t understand is why we’ve never seen these before.”

“Sir, we are in range now,” Captain Sarin informed me. “I’m assuming we should only fire on the Macro cruisers?”

I waved at her dismissively. “Yeah, of course. Choose a target and burn it out of space. One at a time.”

She glanced at me, but I continued examining the mess of metal I had found. It was coated with some kind of black resin, and it was smaller than any Macro I’d ever seen. The six legs were insect-like, but the head-section was bulbous.

I glowered at it, baffled. Where had this thing come from? Had the Macros designed something new, or had they used these small individual units in other conflicts we were unaware of? Maybe we’d never had the bad luck to run into one before, but I didn’t think that was it. These were newly-constructed.

A thought struck me then. I slowly came to the conclusion they were aping our tactics. The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became.

Around me, the rest of the bridge crew fought a fleet battle. But I stayed focused on the thing I’d dragged back into the ship. It was about the size of man. I lifted it, weighing it in my gauntlets. It had a similar weight, being made of lighter metals and polymers. It had six limbs rather than our four—but two of the legs were armed with lasers. I found the repellers next—buried in four of the six appendages.

I frowned fiercely at the thing in my hands. Our most recent battle suit design had been equipped in exactly this way. I shook my head. I was coming to a single inescapable conclusion, and I didn’t like it.

“They’re copying us,” I said. “Copying our tactics and unit design.”

Most of the bridge crew was staring at the sphere in our midst. They were barely listening to me. But that was all right. I was listening to myself. To me, it was clear: the Macros had attempted to build their own version of Star Force Marines. Assault troops that came out of the dark without making any emissions to track them by. Lightly-armed, they weren’t much trouble in small numbers, but if they came out of the dark at us like quiet stealth attackers, they could be dangerous.

Then I had another thought. It was a very worrisome one. “Commander!” I roared.

The man nearest me jumped half out of his suit. At least he gave me his full attention.

“Grab the other end of this thing!” I roared. “Sandra, you help too. We’ve got to get if off this ship now!”

The Commander wasn’t a marine, but he did know how to obey orders. A few seconds later, he and Sandra were helping me run with the clanking multi-legged carcass as we carried it to the nearest airlock. It wasn’t as close as I would have liked. It was about a hundred steps away. I took flight to speed things up, using my repellers inside the ship, which was a safety violation. I half-dragged the other two who bumped along behind me.

“What’s wrong, Kyle?” Sandra asked.

“It’s a bomb,” I said. “At least, I think it is.”

Neither of them dragged their feet after that. We tossed it into the airlock and slapped the emergency release. The outer door disintergrated into a shower of nanites, and the black, twisted form of the Macro flipped and twirled away. It looked like a bundle of black chains being tossed out into the void.

I hit my com-link and connected to Sarin. “Veer sunward. Immediately. That’s an order.”

The ship heeled over and we all leaned into the outer bulkhead. The dead machine vanished quickly. Several long seconds passed as we looked out a tiny window in the airlock. Sandra and the Commander stood next to me, breathing hard. We all tried to look at once, but we could no longer see the thing we’d jettisoned.

Then there was a glaring flash. It shook the ship slightly. It felt like being hit by a gust of wind in a car on a stormy highway. The ship swayed and corrected.

“We’ve just gotten our allotment of rads for the year, I suspect,” I said.

“Did it self-destruct?”

“Yes,” I said. “Just the way my marines do sometimes—when they have nothing else left with which to hurt the enemy.”

I rushed back to the bridge and alerted Miklos to the danger. He told me he already knew something like that was going on. The lurking enemy had not fought terribly well, but they had destroyed several ships by blowing themselves up. Everyone was soon informed—they were not to take aboard any damaged machines to study. That was apparently just what they wanted.

I rubbed at my bristly chin as the fleet battle began in earnest. It was strange to look at the ships depicted inside the sphere. Hundreds were dying on every side, I felt sure of it. Biotics versus machines. We had become like them, and they had adapted as well, using our own tactics against us.

The first stage of the battle was ending. We’d made contact with the enemy, and the Macros were beginning to turn their attention to this new attacker. Jasmine was in charge, and I let her call the shots for now. Her plan was sound, it always had been. The only thing I’d disagreed with was the timing of our entry into the conflict. I’d demanded that we charge in early, but now that we were engaged and mixing it up, everyone was on the same page. We were all fighting to survive and doing our damnedest to destroy the enemy.

As the next stage of the battle unfolded, our gunships rolled forward, accelerating even as the destroyers and our single light cruiser pulled back. We were now in effective range of the enemy railguns. We pushed our own cannons up front to meet fire with fire. The second reason for the pull back was relative velocity. The destroyers each carried marines, and we couldn’t launch them at the enemy cruisers if we didn’t match our relative velocities first.

In the back of my mind, I kept worrying about the Macros and what they were up to. They had clearly been impressed with our tactic of throwing marines at enemy ships. They’d tried to build and operate their own units in a similar fashion. It showed a larger capacity to learn than I’d given them credit for in the past. I’d rarely seen them adapt so effectively. I didn’t like seeing it now, and hoped never to see this kind of flexibility in their methods again.

Essentially, their copycat assault troops had been a failure. They’d had the upper hand, but had misplayed their new assets. They’d reached our ships, crawled secretly over the hulls and once the battle had begun they’d tried to damage the vessels they rode upon. All of this made sense. But they’d ignored the simple expedient of blowing themselves up. They were just machines, after all. They could have all set themselves off on the outer hull of every ship, once they’d reached their targets.

Why hadn’t they done precisely that? It was something of a mystery. The best theory I could come up with was they were aping our tactics as well as our units. When we reached an enemy hull, we didn’t simply commit suicide by blowing up our generators. Possibly, that would have been a very effective tactic. But we’d tried to survive instead. Maybe they’d imitated our methods
too
closely, not realizing that we did some things because it was in our nature to do so, not because they were the very best tactical move.

The more I thought about it, I realized we really did have a potent weapon that we’d barely employed. Every marine had the power to overload his generator and blow a hole in any ship, provided he made it inside or at least was in contact with the hull. But it had never really occurred to me to fight that way. It hadn’t occurred to my men, either. Probably because it involved…blowing ourselves up. How did you train for such a one-way mission? How could I ask my men to participate?

I couldn’t. But the Macros could have done so. Instead, they’d opted to do what we did. Probably because they’d witnessed it and found it very effective.

I frowned as the battle raged. My tough little gunships were on the front line now, and every one of them was taking a serious beating. Fortunately, they were doing plenty of damage in return. They weren’t very good at evading incoming fire, but their solid hulls usually took several hits before they were knocked out. They fought like bulldogs, while the lighter nanotech ships danced and dodged.

Missile barrages came in periodic waves. Usually, they were launched moments before a cruiser was destroyed. It was use-it-or-lose-it at that point, and the Macros understood that game. Each dying ship fired everything it had, and the rest of them fired one missile each. That way, there were a lot of targets to worry about. When the barrages came, Sarin shouted orders, pushing our destroyers forward with orders to concentrate on the missiles. We couldn’t afford for them to get within range and blow a serious hole in our line.

I shook my head, it was such a simple tactic, but the Nanos had failed to come up with it on their own. They didn’t like to switch targets in a fight. They certainly weren’t military geniuses, these little ships. They were more technologically advanced in some ways, but they certainly were being outfought by the Macros. I had to wonder about that. Had the Blues intended for the Macros to conquer enemies? Were they originally warships, maybe put up defensively at first? The Nanos were the explorers, that much was obvious. But the Macros had been designed to construct more of themselves and fight. Who had they planned to fight against?