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Marines, who had been crawling closer from every direction, now turned and moved away. No one argued, which almost made me grin. Maybe they sensed Old Riggs was about to do something crazy, and they wanted no part of it. They were correct, naturally.

Kwon hulked closer. “What’s up, sir?” he said.

“Find me a body. A marine or two that splatted nearby.”

Kwon, to his credit, paused for a second, but he did not even ask why. He just turned around and crawled away. Less than a minute later, he came back dragging a smashed sack of humanity. I didn’t look at the name patch. I didn’t want to know.

“Major Sarin?” I called over my com-link while he approached. I thought it was a good time to check in on how the takeover of the invasion ship was going. “Major Sarin?”

There was no answer. I frowned. There could have been a lot of reasons why she wasn’t answering, including because she was busy fighting for her life. It could be so loud, she couldn’t hear her headset. Or, she could be dead with a Macro marine squatting over her cooling corpse. I didn’t know which it was, but I didn’t like the list of possibilities.

“Sandra?” I called on our private channel. “Lieutenant, are you there?”

More nothing.

I tried to put it out of my mind. They were dead or alive and I couldn’t help them right now, except by doing my own job right. I concentrated on the task at hand. Kwon had figured out what I had in mind by this time, and was already working on the reactor controls.

“How will we get out of range quickly enough when it goes off?” he asked.

I pointed to the dish that still dangled, attached by a stubborn nanite strap to the dead marine. The sight made me appreciate the nanites a bit more, they were loyal little things, clinging to masters long after there was no hope. I knew that after my men had died, frequently we were surprised upon opening up their body bags. The flesh inside was recomposed and perfect, almost as if they’d never died but instead slept in their airless vinyl shrouds. The nanites had repaired their bodies faithfully, even though they were dead and could not be brought back.

Kwon looked at the dish dubiously. It was banged up, with several big dents in the curvature of it. I waved him toward the reactor. “Rig up the trigger. I’ll test this thing.”

“How will it carry both of us?” he asked.

“We only have to go a few hundred feet. Once we are around the cruiser hull, we will be safe from the blast.”

“We hope,” Kwon said.

“Yeah.”

We worked quietly after that. This part of the drill we knew well. Ever since I’d let Wilson kill himself by overloading his suit reactor and bring down the first Macro dome back on Earth, I’d had them build in timers and codes to do this sort of thing in a more organized fashion.

“It should work,” Kwon announced.

“Good enough,” I said. I had the thrust working on the dish. It was a little unstable, but I figured it only had to fly us away from this spot. There was more than enough push to move our combined weights out of here quickly.

I eyed the dish. There was no chance we could both stand on it. I threw myself over the dish on my belly and grunted. “Climb on. We are going to have to be friendly.”

“Let me go on the bottom,” Kwon said.

I looked at him. He was easily twice my weight. Under acceleration, and in order not to be top-heavy, he was right. We would be more stable if he were the base of this marine pyramid. I rolled off the dish and waved him forward. “Hurry. Start the timer and do it.”

“I already did,” Kwon said as he grunted past me.

“What? Go then, go, go, GO!” I shouted as I threw myself onto his back.

The dish rose up and shoved at my gut. My legs dangled, as did Kwon’s. The dish shuddered and bucked, wanting to go into a spin. Kwon fought the controls. I felt like a chimp clinging to my mother. If I hadn’t had nanite strength in my fingers and exoskeletal strength in my gloves, I could never have held on.

I looked back then, and saw right away we were screwed. We were too high. We were never going to make it. The belly turret rolled around quickly, the muzzle glowing white. It was going to take us out, or the explosion was going to do it. Both sources of death were in a race to finish us.

“Down, dammit, down, hug the deck!” I shouted.

“Yeah, yeah!” Kwon grunted.

I was the ultimate backseat driver. My gloves clutched Kwon’s shoulders. Hunks of Kwon’s suit and the thick meat beneath were crushed by my hands, but he didn’t complain. Kwon flipped us over and applied more thrust. A second later, we
were
going downward. We were in an inverted dive. We skimmed over the cruiser’s hull. The rough metal surface was five feet from my visor, three feet, two feet—inches.

Flash.
The world vanished. There was no way the visor could catch up, I should have dialed down the transparency, but I hadn’t. Blinded, I felt myself go into a spin as the shockwave hit us. I knew right then what it was like to be a buzzing fly swatted out of the air by vengeful man’s palm.

I lost my grip on Kwon. I wasn’t sure what had hit us, and I could barely think coherently. A fist closed on my suit after a while, grabbing me and yanking me to a halt. I wasn’t sure who it was, but I reached up and wrapped my own two hands around that fist. Then I knew. That fist was big. It had to be Kwon.

-17-

“Can you hear me, Colonel?” Kwon asked.

I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think it was the first time he’d asked that question. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m all right.”

Kwon chuckled. “If you lie too much, you go to hell. Your mamma taught you that, right sir?”

“Yeah she did,” I said. “The old lady was right. I think I’m headed that way.”

“Can you see me?”

“No. Where are you?”

“About two inches from your face.”

I reached up, and felt his visor. He was pressing it against mine so we could talk in the vacuum. “Oh, yeah. It’s dark.”

Kwon fiddled with something on my helmet. “Your visor is transparent. There is plenty light. I think you forgot to blackout your visor.”

I thought about it. I seemed to recall something then. “Blinded,” I said. “The nanites will fix it. What hit us? Was that the cannon?”

“No,” Kwon said. “That little pop was the reactor blowing. The turret is gone.”

“What did you set the timer to?”

I could sense Kwon shrugging, even though I couldn’t see him. “I don’t know. I didn’t set it to anything. I just turned it on.”

Great
, I thought. What was the default timer setting? Forty-five seconds, if my memory served. Kwon was many things, but he wasn’t a genius. I groaned aloud. “Remind me to bust you down to sergeant again after this campaign,” I said.

“Fine with me, Colonel,” he said.

I snorted, knowing it probably was fine with him. Kwon was not an ambitious man. His only true drive was the destruction of the machines. He didn’t care about much else. No wonder we got along so well.

“What’s the status of the invasion?” I asked, suddenly alarmed. “What’s going on?”

“No word from the invasion ship. They blew a hole in the hull though, and our last assault ship flew over here and started drilling.”

“Major Welter’s ship?” I asked, trying to get my mind working again at full speed. “Good. Take me over there fast. My eyes are itching, the nanites are on overdrive. I should get some sight back soon.”

Kwon took my hand in his big paw. When I told him to take me fast, he didn’t argue, he just did it. My feet bumped and skipped over the cruiser’s hull. I stumbled behind him like a toddler being dragged through a grocery store by a pissed-off mom. I sensed heat and saw flashes of light ahead.

“Is that the laser drill?” I asked.

“Yeah. You can see something now, huh?”

“They’ll know we are coming through. Get everyone down and ready to fire when we breach the hull.”

Kwon shouted orders. Marines I couldn’t see ringed the spot and readied their rifles.

“Major Welter?” I shouted over the local com-link.

“Sir?” Welter’s voice crackled in my headset. “Is that you Colonel Riggs? Of the infamous Riggs Pigs?”

“The same,” I said.

“Everyone figured you were dead, or at least out of this fight, sir.”

“They thought wrong,” I said. “Are you through the hull yet?”

“No Colonel, this metal is thick and tough. Several times thicker than the invasion ship.”

“I want you to get out of the assault ship and let it drill on automatic.”

“Why sir?”

“Because they know we are coming.”

There was a brief moment of quiet before Welter spoke again. “I’m out of there, sir.”

I nodded appreciatively. He had moved with shocking speed. The man was a survivor. I supposed that anyone who made it this far in my vicinity could be qualified as harder to kill than a cockroach.

Less than a minute later, our last assault ship blew up. It shot outward like a cork fired from a cannon’s mouth. I watched it tumble away, burning. My vision wasn’t perfect yet, that would take another hour or two. But I could see bright lights, especially with my left eye, which was apparently less damaged.

The assault ship was indeed brightly lit. An incandescent fireball of spinning wreckage threw burning chunks of molten metal everywhere. I felt a few hot droplets rain on my suit. The Macros had probably set a charge right under the spot where we worked to breach their hull. The moment the drilling laser had burned through, it had set off the explosives and blown the ship into space.

“I want a recon squad into that breach!” I shouted. “Marines, move!”

I watched a group of shapes approach the breach. They were hazy and indistinct, but I could tell they were my men. They threw in concussion grenades and followed up with a blazing fullisade of laser fire into the smoking hole at their feet.

“You heard the man,
get in there!
” roared Kwon.

They hopped into the hole and vanished. We waited twenty seconds. Since they were still alive, I ordered more men in. I told them they had to burn their way through every wall they saw. They were to ignore empty passages and inviting hatchways. I wanted them to dig deeply into the ship, burning the walls and the floors at their feet until they got a good distance away from the breach. They were to assume the enemy had set up more booby-traps along the obvious routes of advance.

Several minutes later, when over a hundred of my marines were down there in the thick of it, I decided to join them. Kwon’s heavy hand fell on my shoulder.

“Your eyes, sir?” he asked.

I shook him off. I could see with my left pretty well now. It was little dim, but I could sight along a rifle barrel. “They are fine now,” I said. “Nanites work fast, remember?”

Kwon followed me into the hole, shaking his head. “Hell is a bad place, Colonel.”

“Shut up,” I said. “I know all about it.”

They waited until about half of us were inside before they hit us. I’m not sure if that was due to a plan they had or if it was just the best they could do. I think our tactic of drilling through decks and walls had them baffled. We were not approaching in the expected directions. Several more charges did go off, blowing apart my leading marine scouts. But most of us made it into the cruiser’s guts and spread out. We held ten percent of the ship when the lights went out.

For a second, I thought my eyes were having a catastrophic relapse. I knew it wasn’t our suit lights, as everyone had them on. Shouts went up from a dozen throats, reporting limited visibility. I knew then it wasn’t my eyes, it was much worse, it was everyone’s eyes.

“Some kind of blackout gas, sir,” reported a lieutenant from delta company. “We can’t see a thing.”

“Turn on your motion sensors. Look for big, metal bugs.”

They came at us out of the fog they had created. It was effective, this stuff. I figured it had been designed to allow them to see, but not us. I could hear firing and screams, but saw nothing beyond my HUD. Something hit me in the side and sent me spinning. I almost fired, but stopped myself. From the feel of it when it hit me, it must have been one of my marines running into me. I chided myself. I had to get into the game.

“Men, I want you to draw knives and pistols. Make very sure of your targets. Try to hold your positions while this smoke clears out the breach. Can anyone up topside see anything?”

“It’s venting, sir,” came a voice. “This is Major Welter. I’m standing near the breach. It looks like a volcano is erupting.”

“Right,” I said. “Marines, hold your positions and try not to shoot one another.”

“They are charging in close, sir!” came an anonymous report. I heard sounds of laser fire and more shouting, much of it incoherent.

I felt I was losing control of the situation. The Macros had identified a critical weakness in our operational effectiveness. I figured if I lived through this experience, I would redesign our battle suits to allow marines to fight more effectively without visual input.

“Hold tight,” I said. “The gas is clearing!”

When it did clear, we shot the retreating Macros. They had dragged off a number of my men. We’d lost thirty marines. Only four of the Macro workers had been disabled. They lie in the passages, kicking spastically, repetitively. Like robot toys with dying batteries. They had the familiar metallic, headless-ant look. They had beam weapons mounted where their heads were supposed to be.