Annihilation (Star Force Series) (17 page)

“I’ve been examining possible drop-points,” she said. “I’d recommend this one.”

“That looks pretty rough,” I said. “I’ll have trouble setting up any kind of base there.

Jasmine nodded. “Exactly. That’s why there are no machines at this location. At least, none of the big ones. There are a few workers tearing minerals from the cliffs.”

I understood her reasoning immediately. When establishing a beachhead, it was best to land without being pelted by defensive fire. The mountain was steep and unfriendly-looking, but it would afford us higher firing positions and would allow us to land our initial deployment battalions with minimal losses. Still, I was unconvinced.

“What else have you got?”

She paged to a new spot. This one was underwater off a wide, rocky beach. There were no pretty sand beaches on these new islands. They hadn’t had time to form yet.

“You could come down under the cover of water, here,” she said. “This island is small and relatively undefended. There are no enemy factories here, so the machines seemed to have given it a lower priority.”

I massaged my chin and stared. Really, neither of these drop sites appealed to me. But with only a few enemy-infested islands to choose from, we didn’t have a lot of options. This wasn’t like Earth, where you could always land farther away and advance on foot to your destination. There was very little land to fight over. And I didn’t want to get into a deep undersea battle if I could help it. I’d done that before, and it had been a grim experience.

“All right,” I said at last. “I’m going to take these two locations and hit them immediately.”

Captain Sarin looked up at me with wide eyes. I could tell I’d surprised her. She looked pleased and alarmed at the same time.

“I imagine there are other locations to choose from, if you went over every island carefully.”

I nodded. “Probably. But we don’t have another day to screw around. The Macros are growing stronger every hour, sinking their teeth into this world. We’re not gaining in strength, in fact we’re losing in relative terms. So, I’m going to trust your judgment. As far as I’m concerned, these are the best spots to land.”

She nodded and began working on the details of the plan. I saw battalions appear on the map as if they’d been dropped. Our Marine battalions had a fighting strength of about a thousand men each, broken into ten companies. She grouped them on both landing zones, placing three battalions underwater and the rest on the mountainous island. The three on the ocean floor were arranged in a crescent near the beach they were assigned to invade.

I tapped at the three battalions she’d placed in the water.  

“These will have to wait,” I said. “Prep the land drop first. I’ve got something planned for these oceans before we put a single boot into them.”

“Something planned?”

“Yeah. Where’s Marvin?”

The robot showed up a few minutes later, looking excited. “You requested my presence, Colonel Riggs?”

“Yes, I
ordered
you to come up here, Marvin. I want you to link up with that ring in the seabed again. I want you to reverse your prior command sequence.”

Captain Sarin and Marvin both stared at me. When he’d first slithered up, most of his cameras had been trained on the tactical displays. Now there were too many cameras on me to easily count them.

“Let me verify that command,” Marvin said. “You want me to reset the ring—to cause it to empty the oceans of Yale again? I was under the impression we’d taken great steps to stop that process.”

“Yes,” I said. “But now I want you to turn that ring into a giant sucking hole.”

I looked down at the display, and zoomed in on the dark central circle of water the islands surrounded. “If we can, we’re going to flush every machine that hasn’t made it out of the water yet back to wherever they came from.”

The glare coming up from the screen under-lit my face. I knew I was smiling broadly, and my teeth were probably shining with bluish light.

But I didn’t care if I looked half-mad to my staff. I was really looking forward to this little surprise. The machines were going to regret crawling onto this world—if they were capable of regretting anything.

-15-

Our drop-troop technology had improved over the years. Our first efforts had been makeshift at best. I recalled loading up marines into steel boxes resembling railroad cars and carrying them with the cargo arm on my Nano ship. We’d later advanced to small one-man flying disks we called “skateboards”.

Lately, I’d had a new set of problems. Not all my marines were human now. I found that the Centaur troops operated best on modified versions of our self-mobile disks. We’d changed the name from skateboard to surfboard, as they were longer and more powerful. These units could carry a marine with full kit across a star system if necessary, but we rarely went more than a few million miles on them.

The Centaur troops liked them a lot, because they could travel in space without having to be confined in a tight compartment. Even after the Microbial baths Marvin had worked out to change their brains slightly, the Centaurs still shied away from being crammed into a troop pod. Riding the surfboard gave them freedom of movement and more wide-open vistas than anyone could want.

The problem with surfboards came into play when dealing with a large planet that possessed an atmosphere. They simply couldn’t drop fast enough to the target. As any old-fashioned paratroop will tell you, dropping from a high altitude into a battlefield is not a fun experience. You’re completely exposed up there. In a modern combat environment with automated anti-air weaponry that could pinpoint a missile and fire in less than a second, floating down on the breezes was unacceptable. You had to get down to the ground in a hot LZ as fast as technologically possible in order to survive the enemy AA.

I knew the machines would be gunning for us when I left Eden, so I’d left most of the Centaurs behind. I’d come out with human marines and our latest designs for encapsulated drops.

The men had a special term for these new contraptions. They called them “torpedoes”—or, if they were in a sour mood, “flying coffins”. I’d decided to stick to the first term as it was more positive and slightly more accurate. The units actually looked like torpedoes or old dumb-bombs when they were dropped from space. They were about ten feet long with sleek ceramic exteriors made to absorb heat. That was their primary purpose: to allow our troops to drop from orbit at extreme speeds without burning up in the target planet’s atmosphere. They were designed for single use and used simple materials, so they could be mass-manufactured by our Macro factories.

We had two kinds of alien production units: Macro systems and Nano systems. Our Macro units were big, dumb and amazingly powerful. They produced things like the hulls of our ships and our biggest generators. The smaller factories, courtesy of the Nanos, were much smaller and produced finer goods. Most of these were made up of nanites, which could be used to make almost anything from intelligent brainboxes to smart metal walls. Of the two, the Nano units were probably more valuable to Star Force, but I always wanted and needed both types of factories.

I decided to go down with the first wave. Sandra wasn’t happy about this, and she let her feelings be known about ten minutes after I’d made my decision.

She found me in the main passageway less than a hundred yards from the sally port. I was wearing my heavy exoskeletal armor, and trotting happily for the exit when she appeared in front of me, hands on hips and eyes blazing.

I pulled up short, clanking and screeching to a stop. Around me, about five hundred other troops kept thundering by. They gave me smirks as they went by, no doubt knowing what I was in for before I did. My relationship with Sandra was well-known among the troops. Few of them talked about it in my presence, but I found it slightly embarrassing anyway.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded.

“To Yale,” I said, “the hard way. Now, please step aside so I can invade this moon, Sandra.”

“I would like to have a little talk with you first.”

I hesitated. As always, probably since time immemorial, I weighed my options when confronting my girl. Sure, I could blow her off and soldier on. But sometimes putting up the pretense of listening carefully to her complaints could defuse a major blowup later on down the line.

Against my better judgment, I stepped into an alcove stuffed with emergency equipment. There were fire hoses, med-packs and nanite injection kits strapped to every surface. I had to place my foot-wide armored boots carefully to avoid smashing anything with them.

“These suits are getting more bulky every day,” I complained. “I think the next generation should be lighter and more mobile.”

“Whatever they look like, I don’t want you wearing one,” she said. “At least not without a very good reason.”

It was about then another person wandered into the alcove with us. It was none other than Lieutenant Alexa Brighton. Her eyes were wider than ever. I wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen a company of marines in full battle-kit before. She looked stunned. Unfortunately, she also provided the marching line of men something interesting to look at. They paused at the alcove, examining the scene. They looked at the two women in confusion for a second, then suddenly brightened. Several of them grinned and gave me the thumbs-up behind Sandra’s back. It took me a second to realize what was going on: they thought Sandra had caught me with the girl. It had happened before, and the results were legendary.

I did my best to ignore them as they tramped steadily by. This was difficult, as the level of noise a line of power-armored marines made was near that of a passing freight train.

“This discussion will have to wait,” I told her. “I’ve got a planet to save.”

“
Why
do you have to go down there personally?” Sandra hissed at me.

I heaved a sigh. Lieutenant Brighton stared at the two of us with an expression of dazed curiosity, but didn’t interrupt.

“I’m a marine, first and foremost,” I said. “I’m going down with the troops to personally oversee the defense of Yale. I can’t do that as well from space.”

“Yes, but you’re risking your life for a small benefit,” Sandra argued.

My face twisted in annoyance. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I always am.”

“No you’re not always fine. Sometimes you lose an arm, or something.”

“We’ve got the best medical now,” I chuckled. “I’ll grow a new one.”

The women studied me for a moment. I had to wonder what Alexa was thinking.

Two more passing marines paused and made a slightly obscene motion behind the women. Then they high-fived one another and trotted away. I frowned, but decided to pretend I hadn’t noticed.

“You know what I think?” Sandra said. “I think you just can’t keep out of the excitement. I think you love it too much, Kyle. It will kill you one day.”

“What do you think, Lieutenant?” I asked, turning to her.

Alexa thought about it for a second. “I think I’d like to go down with you. It does look exciting.”

This wasn’t the response either Sandra or I had expected.

“No way,” Sandra said, eyes blazing. “You’re staying up here with me.”

Alexa dropped her eyes and nodded. I felt a moment of compassion for the girl. Sandra had probably been a harsh woman to follow around. If Alexa wanted to drop with me, Sandra had to be giving her hell.

“That’s right,” I said, “it’s out of the question. You have no armor training, no nanites, and no place in ground-based operation.” I turned to Sandra. “Has she been giving you any good information about Earth?”

“Yes,” Sandra said. “Her father is very highly ranked. She has a lot of stories to tell. Things aren’t going well back home, Kyle. It’s turned into some kind of crazy cult-of-personality dictatorship.”

I nodded, unsurprised. Crow had always been big on himself and he’d wanted total power since day one. Now, except for the stellar frontier, he had it.

“When I get back in a few days, we’ll go over it in detail,” I said. “Thanks for your help, Lieutenant.”

She nodded, and I turned to go.

A thin arm like a steel band blocked my way. I could have tossed Sandra aside, but I didn’t. I turned back to her.

I had my visor open and she pushed her face into it. It wasn’t easy to kiss a man in full power-armor, but she managed it. She practically had to climb onto my suit to do it.

Hooting broke out from the hallway full of streaming marines before we disengaged.  A general cheer arose as I finally turned and trotted with the rest of them before she could think of another way to delay me.

I stepped onto a circular pad about twenty feet in diameter. Above me, a loud hissing sound erupted. I knew this was the hydraulics issuing a new pod. Just in time, I snapped down my visor and put my arms flat at my sides.

There was a crashing sound and everything went dark for second. If seemed as if someone had dropped a safe on my head. It was the drop-pod being lowered by powerful nanite-arms. The pod snapped into place and I felt as if I were being picked up—because I was.

Inside full power-armor it’s easy to feel claustrophobic under the best of circumstances, but when they seal you in a flying coffin on top of it all and throw you out into space, the sensation is inescapable. The circular pad was really a smart metal door. Once the pod was in place, the pad had disintegrated and let me fall through it into the firing chamber.