Annihilation (Star Force Series) (24 page)

I knew the Macros would come again if we didn’t hit them first. They’d never be content to let us share ground so close to them. But that could wait until another day because I had my beachhead, and I was happy.

The next island target was one of the smallest in the archipelago that surrounded the undersea ring. Shortly after my group had cleared the seas near the big island of attacking machines, three battalions splashed down in the shallow seas off the smaller island, which I’d named “Tango”. It was shaped like a “T” and my battalions had landed just above the top crossbar on the map. Following their orders, they assembled underwater then advanced on the shoreline.

The first reports I received concerning the assault weren’t positive.

“Colonel Riggs?” Captain Sarin asked, hitting my helmet with a private channel.

I stopped going over casualty reports and vids of our assaults on the big machines to take the call.

“Go ahead, Captain.”

“The beach assault is meeting stiff resistance. The machines were forewarned by your attack, I believe.”

“What kind of resistance?”

“Gun emplacements and a series of ridges lined with smaller machines. I’ve ordered the marines to retreat into the water where the laser turrets can’t hit them.”

“Can we use our fighters to support them?”

“Yes, but I calculate a high loss rate.”

I gnashed my teeth. I didn’t want to lose the fighters, nor any more marines. The fighters were primarily designed to fight in space, not for ground support. My marines should be able to do what they were destined to do.

“If three battalions of marines can’t take a beach, we’re going to lose this anyway.”

“I believe they
can
take it, sir. But I wanted to ask you for support. If some element of your force on the big island could cross the water and hit the enemies flank, I think we could lower our losses by seventy percent.”

“On what basis did you arrive at that calculation?”

She showed me her numbers via my computer scroll. I flattened the screen, which wanted to roll up at the corners. Even smart screens tended to curl.

“I see your point,” I said after reviewing the data. “If we come in on the eastern peninsula, they don’t have much there. We’ll be able to get our boots on the ground and advance under cover. While the enemy is busy with us, the three invading battalions can charge the front line and take the turrets out. We can even bring the fighters in when the enemy is engaged and hit them with combined arms.”

“Exactly, Colonel.”

I chewed it over unhappily. “We’ll still suffer harsh casualties,” I said, “but short of retreating I can’t see what else we can do. Those men can’t sit there at the bottom of the sea forever.”

“How long do you think it will take you to get a full battalion to the peninsula?”

I thought it over, and while I did, it occurred to me that Sarin really
was
running this op. It wasn’t the sort of situation I was accustomed to. Normally, my officers didn’t call the shots—not on something as big as this. But she was doing a good job, and she was in the better position to do the job. It wasn’t her fault I’d insisted on coming down here and doing the dirty work personally.

“All right,” I said at last, going over timing and readiness issues with her. “We’ll be there in about twenty hours. It will be a long night, crossing the water and all. I’ll take only our freshest troops along with a sprinkling of veterans who have experience with our newest tactics.”

Captain Sarin inquired about the tactics I was talking about, and I explained how we’d brought down so many of the machines so quickly. If she was impressed, it was hard to tell. It usually was with her. Unlike most of my troops, she didn’t express herself with vigor.

“You’re results are impressive, sir. I’ll relay these tactical refinements to the rest of the officers.”

“Fine. But I still want an experienced crew with me. I’ll take Captain Gaines’s company, for starters.”

Captain Gaines heard his name and wandered closer. “What’s up, Colonel?”

I held up my hand, shushing him.

“Very well, sir,” Captain Sarin said in my ear. “I’ve placed his company on the roster. Please move west as quickly as possible and merge with Fourth Battalion. They are full strength and positioned close to the crossing point.”

“Got it, let them know I’m coming, Riggs out.”

“Anything I should know about, sir?” Captain Gaines asked.

I grinned at him. “Yeah. You’re going to love it.”

Over the next ten minutes, I briefed the Captain, who didn’t voice any objections for once. I thought he might be in shock.

“I know your men have been through a lot, Captain,” I said. “But that’s how most marines feel the day after an invasion. Our work here isn’t through, not by any measure. Less than ten percent of the machines have been taken out—and that’s only counting the ones we can see from space.”

Nodding numbly, Captain Gaines followed me to brief the men. There were a few groans, but they gathered their kits quickly enough and we set out. We had about sixty effectives in all. I frowned at that. Hadn’t we started out with two full companies? These men had indeed gone through the ringer. I decided to split them up when we merged with Fourth Battalion. If I put a fireteam of about four men in every company in the fresh battalion, they could disseminate the tactics and lead by example—they’d also be less likely to be taken out entirely.

“We’re going to merge up with the Fourth and serve as reinforcements for them, bringing the battalion up to full strength.”

“Oh,” said Gaines, sounding disappointed but resigned. “I guess my company is finished then. I’m sorry to see my first command disintegrate.”

“What?” I asked, giving him a frown. “No, no,” I said. “They’ve taken a few losses. It just so happens they lost a Captain. I’m giving you a new company. Choose a fireteam to take with you from the old one.”

Gaines perked up. “Yes, sir!”

He trotted away, and I looked after him, smiling. Then I had to get back on the radio with Sarin. I checked, and found out Fourth Battalion hadn’t lost anyone. I ordered her to transfer a junior captain to another outfit we were leaving behind on the big island.

“I don’t care what you assign him to,” I told her. “Put him in charge of digging latrines. Think of something.”

I signed off again, muttering that I had to do everything around here. When Gaines came back, he had a hard-eyed group of killers at his back. They didn’t look like the cleanest cut team, but they looked like they could shoot.

“These men will do fine,” I told him.

By the time we reached Fourth Battalion, another hour had passed. I let the men rest while I went to talk to the Major in charge. I was surprised to see a familiar face. The commanding officer of the Fourth was none other than Major Randal Sloan. I laughed when I shook his hand.

“I get it now,” I said.

“Sir?”

“I mean I now understand why this battalion is almost entirely intact.”

Sloan’s face fell. I guess I shouldn’t have said it. Major Sloan had a reputation for self-preservation on the battlefield and in space. Somehow, he was always the first man to reach the airlock or the lifeboat when the ship was breaking up. He was a soldier, just like all my marines, but he had the survival instincts of a junkyard dog.

“Quit pouting, Sloan,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Remember, I appreciate men who can stay alive. You’ve got a knack for it, and it’s something I need today. In fact, that’s exactly why Captain Gaines is here at my side.”

I briefly explained Gaines’s rapid advancement. Gaines tried to look tough while I spoke. When I finished the introduction, Sloan shook Gaines’s hand and welcomed him aboard.

“You’ve got Alpha Company,” Sloan said, gesturing toward the beach. “They’ve recently lost their commander.”

“It will be an honor serving under you, Major,” Gaines said.

After another round of salutes, he trotted toward the beach. Behind him, his handpicked fireteam followed closely. They’d almost never spoken since we’d broken up their original company.

Sloan looked after Gaines’s crew wonderingly. “You sure can pick’em, sir.”

“Never mind that,” I said. “Are you ready to cross the water or not?”

“Negative, sir. We stopped mop-up operations as soon as we got your call, but our suits haven’t fully recharged. I would imagine that your people’s suits need an hour or two to top off as well. We can’t make the crossing with people sinking into the waves on the way.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking at my gauge. It read forty-seven percent. I hadn’t fully charged before I left, but that was still an alarming number. “We flew here to save time,” I said, “but possibly that was a mistake. These new power-suits take some getting used to.”

“The men love them—as long as they have power left in them.”

Our suits had generators, of course. All our marines carried generators and laser projectors. But the generators could not, by themselves, generate enough power to keep the suit fully operational under battle conditions. Our big, hard-hitting laser projectors sucked too much power. So we’d designed the suits to operate on batteries most of the time, and they automatically recharge themselves back up to full when idle. Unfortunately, that recharge period often took too long.

I called Sarin again and demanded that a power source be dropped from orbit. Ten of them, in fact, one for every company in the battalion. We had to get recharged and moving soon. The longer we delayed the assault on the target island the longer the machines had to dig in and set up an ambush.

Captain Sarin was nothing if not efficient. Within twenty minutes, she had the big generators ferried down from orbit by destroyers with black-nanite arms. They were placed in a neat row on the beach and the men rushed them the moment they were down and humming.

“They must really need a charge,” I said, watching. “You would think we’d laid out a buffet and rang the dinner bell.”

“Their suits mean life to them, sir,” Sloan said. “And power keeps the suits operating.”

A few minutes later I walked up to the nearest hulking generator. It detected me and sent a tendril of nanites threading their way across the sand to my suit. It looked as if someone had poured out a bottle of mercury—except that the liquid ran uphill.

The line of nanites met my left boot and the tickling sensation of heavy power passed through me. There was always some detectable level of bleed when you dealt with this kind of amperage.

We relaxed, ate and talked while our suits charged up. I reflected that, although it was strategic downtime, maybe it wasn’t all that bad to have suits that needed a charge. Sometimes, marines needed to recharge, too.

In less than an hour after I’d merged my company into Fourth Battalion, we were on our way across the waves. To me, this was the most fun you could have in power armor. I’d always enjoyed Jet Skis back home, and this was a close equivalent.

The huge metal toes of my boots touched a cresting wave now and again, but otherwise I stayed fairly dry. Hundreds of other marines zoomed along in loose formation all around me. Beneath us, our grav-lifters pushed at the water making it dish-outward and form small wakes. Behind us, we left a thousand white trails in the black seawater that rippled and bounced until the sea smoothed out again.

Soon, I could see Tango with my helmet set to infrared. It was a greenish zone of warmth on the near horizon. We were still in the middle of ‘second night’ on Yale, and we were using our infrared systems to see. The land was much cooler than the hot seawater, so it registered green while the ocean below my feet was a glaring white.

Beach invasions are always problematic, but natural conditions on Yale made this particular invasion worse than the norm. We would have to come in at night, flying over the water. This made us perfect targets for enemy emplacements on the target island.

Yale’s climate didn’t help. One of the biggest concerns was the behavior of the tides here. On Earth, our relatively small moon gave our oceans pretty impressive tides for its size. The difference in ocean depths on a given beach was often four feet between high and low tide.

But Yale was much more dramatic when it came to moving water around the surface than what we were accustomed to on the relatively placid oceans of old Earth. Here, there was the gas giant itself, a massive gravitation force of crushing proportions. There were a number of local moons in the planetary system as well, each exerting their own significant forces on the oceans of this world. As a result, tides were rather chaotic and could vary by as much as thirty feet in an hour. It was almost like witnessing a continuous series of rolling tidal waves.

Our power-armor would keep us from drowning, but we had to take the tidal movements into account. The islands literally lost or gained ten percent of their surface area depending on the time of day. It was safe to say that humans would never be able to swim on these dangerous beaches.

We hit the shores of Tango at low tide. The last thousand yards were a muddy slog, but I ordered my men to turn off their grav-lifters and hump it to cover. We needed to save power.

The dark beach was soon full of clanking marines. We made it about a quarter of the way to cover when something spotted us and opened fire. Streaks of incoming fire spat out, and to my surprise they weren’t lasers—they were pellets. Hard-hitting rounds of ballistic ammunition flashed out to greet us from a dozen machinegun nests on the ridge ahead.