Annihilation (Star Force Series) (26 page)

“Yes, sir. There are plenty of factors, like the shock of the strikes on the men. They’ll tend to advance more slowly while their comrades are falling. Also, they’ll be able to concentrate fire and take people down much faster with so many guns.”

“Ten guns would be nothing. We’d take them easily. But two or three hundred—that kind of force could stop our attack cold.”

“The enemy will rip us a new one. That’s my conclusion.”

I glanced at him suspiciously. Sloan was not known for his self-sacrificing nature. “I guess you’re about to request we drop a nuke on the center of the island.”

“I thought about that, but I think it would fail. The enemy is sure to have enough AA to stop a small barrage of missiles. We’d have to abandon the island and pound the place from orbit, expending a large amount of our stockpiles.”

“What is your recommendation in this case?” I asked, honestly curious about what he’d come up with.

“We should call in the fighters, sir. We haven’t seen any systems with good AA capability yet. These ballistic guns are good against troops at close range, but they should be easy to take out with fast-moving aircraft.”

I thought about it, and I agreed with the Major. I contacted Captain Sarin and asked her to throw a wing of fighters into the attack. Striking just as we came into range of these guns and made contact, we could sit back and let them make a pass. The air strikes should soften up the target.

“I’ll get her to put the gunships on it, too. We’ll bomb them into the stone age, then mop up with ground troops.”

“I’d like to show you something else, sir,” Sloan said. He handed me a pod of some kind. It was crusty and black.

“What’s this?”

“I think it’s an egg, sir. A Crustacean egg.”

I looked around in alarm. I’d noticed the bulbous objects in the gun nests of the enemy. I examined the object for a second. It did indeed look like a sea creature’s egg—a big one. It was a little bigger than a chicken egg.

“I thought Lobster eggs were carried around by the parents or something,” I said.

Sloan threw up his hands. “We don’t know much about their physiology. They do lay eggs, and those are eggs. They’re all over the island. The nests form nice circular depressions, like little craters.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “And the Macros have been using the nests to set up their guns. They’re perfect for the purpose.”

“For what it’s worth, sir,” Sloan said.

“Thank you, Major. It might be worth quite a bit.”

Sloan dismissed himself as I pondered the black egg and hustled up the slope after my troops. I knew the Crustaceans were in the area. They had troops here, sitting in the shallow areas of the ocean. So far, they hadn’t been willing to commit their forces to aid us. I knew they weren’t sure we would win, and the risks were high if we failed and they had to deal with the Macros on their own after we lost the battle.

But now we were facing a tough fight. This single island had already cost me a number of casualties. There were nine more islands to go, and the machines were building replacements out there under the sea as fast as they could. From the moment I’d landed, I knew I was in a race against time. The basic problem with fighting the machines had always been attrition. They could build a new soldier and load a program into its brain in hours. Human troops took about twenty years to mature and train. We just couldn’t keep up.

I looked upslope. I could see the peak now, the crown of the island. It was about five thousand feet high and it was a rocky, ugly crag. Climbing that under fire, just to take an alien island…

“Marvin?” I said, calling him directly. “Marvin, are you there?”

“Yes, Colonel Riggs.”

“Marvin, I need you to translate while I talk to the Crustaceans. Can you do a video link to my helmet camera?”

“Yes—but the quality will be poor in low light, and there will be a transmission delay.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “They don’t have to get a perfect picture. They probably won’t want one, anyway.”

“Opening connection…” Marvin said. “Testing connection…Link made.”

“Now, connect me with the Crustacean command council.”

“Connection request denied.”

“What?”

“Connection request denied.”

I rolled my eyes. “I got that. Why are they rejecting the request?”

“No reasons were given, sir. It’s a protocol element. A hand-shaking process is established between the initiating transmission device and the—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, growing impatient. “Okay, just send them the video feed. Send it to them as a series of still images, if you have to. No words, no two-way channels. Just images.”

“Transmitting.”

I stopped marching and dipped my head down to aim the camera at the broken egg in my hand. The camera on my helmet activated, causing a red light to glow inside my visor. An external floodlight snapped on.

Kwon came near and stepped from foot-to-foot. I knew he wanted to say something, but I was determined to get the attention of these responsibility-ducking Lobsters. They knew why I was calling. They had to know I wanted help, and they didn’t want to hear about it.

After a few seconds of staring at the damaged egg, I wandered over to the dished out nest where a gun had been. It was littered with broken shells.

“What are you doing, sir?” Kwon asked at last, unable to contain his curiosity.

I waved for him to hush and walked to another nest. This one was bigger, and I found it had scars where the tripod had been set. I examined these square holes which had been punched down into the walls of the nest.

“Are you still transmitting images, Marvin?”

“I’ve sent approximately six thousand stills, sir.”

“All right, turn off the feed. That should be enough to get them interested.”

Kwon picked up a broken egg shell and crushed it in his gauntlet before I could stop him. About a second after he did so, the camera light went out.

“Dammit, Kwon, quit fooling with that. It’s a Crustacean nest. They raised their young right here.”

“Their kids?” he asked, dropping the egg. “Did you take a picture of that?”

I thought about it. “Yeah, I think I did.”

“Bad idea,” he said, then stomped away after the rest of the battalion.

I hurried after him, frowning fiercely. I hoped Kwon hadn’t blown it. I hoped against hope that Marvin had stopped transmitting when I told him too, not when my helmet shut down. But I couldn’t be sure. I thought about asking Marvin, but it wasn’t worth the effort. The Crustaceans had either gotten the images or they hadn’t.

Marvin called me back about ten minutes later.

“Colonel Riggs? I have an incoming channel request from the Crustaceans. The request is flagged as urgent.”

“I bet it is,” I mumbled. “Okay, open the channel and translate for me, Marvin.”

“To the being known as Colonel Kyle Riggs,” said the aquatic voice. “We have received your images of violence and desecration. You’re barbarism quotient has reached new, unprecedented levels.”

“Please excuse any accidental damaging of your nests,” I said quickly, before they could call me any more names. “The purpose of the images was to inform and educate, nothing else.”

“You have achieved your goals. Never have we viewed such gruesome behavior on the part of a thinking biotic being. We’ve already commissioned a task force to rewrite our thesis on the topic of brutality among lower species. Up until this point, we’d believed the machines were heartless monsters, but you have reeducated us. We now know that biotic beings are worse.”

“Worse?” I asked. “How so?”

“Because you have young, and you therefore understand the protective instincts of a fellow biotic species. Had a machine crushed our young so callously, just to make a threat clear, it would been a lesser crime, as they are incapable of experiencing the agony they are causing. They would have the excuse of the ignorant.”

“Okay, look,” I said. “Let me stop you right there. I didn’t send you those images to threaten you. I sent them to show you what the machines are doing. They’re using the beds of your young—your nests—to place weapons systems. Check the images that study the Macro tripods and the imprints they leave.”

“Always, when the cheater attempts to explain his crimes, the discussion goes in this fashion. He vacillates from one lie to the next, hoping against hope one of them will hold sway. We have examined the evidence, and it is damning. Do you think we are mental incompetents?”

“Hold on a second—Marvin? Could you dig through the files on my helmet? I took video of the original gun emplacements about an hour ago, when we first encountered them on the beach. Transmit those. Transmit the battle we had to win to knock out those guns.”

“Searching…transmitting.”

The Crustaceans complained further while Marvin worked on complying with my orders. I had to hear all about how dumb I was, how cheaters were always caught and harshly punished, and how Crustaceans were not fools to be duped by the lowliest student. I endured this invective, trying to understand how they felt. They’d been horrified, and they needed to unload on somebody. Still, I was gritting my teeth by the time they stopped and switched directions.

“How were these images fabricated?” the Crustaceans asked suddenly.

“With my helmet camera,” I said.

“The Macros have a treaty with our people. They would not violate it in such a direct fashion.”

“Does that treaty take into account the treatment of your dead? Those sites were exposed and inactive when the Macros decided to make them into machinegun nests.”

The Crustaceans fell silent for several seconds. I was about to ask if the connection had been broken, when the voice came back on the line. “The desecration of grave sites is not specifically mentioned in the agreement,” the voice said, sounding defeated and sad.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “The machines have no consideration for others. Nothing like what we call ‘common decency’. We humans, on the other hand, are fighting to aid you against these monsters. We’re not the heartless ones, we’re your liberators. And yet, you will not help us.”

The connection was silent for a time. I sensed they were talking it out amongst themselves. I let them make their decision. I figured I’d made my point, and it was time for them to man-up. I’d stopped short of threatening to abandon the campaign, but that thought was in the back of my mind.

I trotted after Fourth Battalion to catch up. Several minutes later, the Crustaceans finally responded.

“We have reconsidered,” they said. “We’ve been monitoring your advance toward the machines. We will march out of the water on the western side of the island to join you when the attack begins.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll give new orders to my men. They will avoid damaging any more of your nests if possible. Let’s hope this combined assault will begin a new era of cooperation between our two peoples.”

“Possibly, it will,” the Crustaceans said. “Pain is instructive. Let the learning begin.”

I frowned after the connection was broken. I wasn’t entirely sure what they’d meant by their final statement.

-22-

Major Sloan was pleased to hear I’d gotten a commitment from the Crustaceans. In his mind, they’d been entirely too complacent during this campaign.

“Those Lobsters have been lying back and milking it all along,” he said. “It’s about time you got them on board, sir.”

I nodded disinterestedly. Everyone I’d spoken with felt that way. But what seemed like a no-brainer to most of my officers was a big move for the Crustaceans. I understood that they’d already suffered significantly in this war, and if Star Force failed to push back the machines, they’d suffer a great deal more. They were taking a big risk. The change of heart on their part was a very serious decision.

“What made them do it?” asked Sloan.

I looked at him vaguely. I’d been thinking about how to take down the fortifications we were about to walk into.

“What was that, Major?” I asked him.

“How did you get these water-chickens to join us? How did you talk them into it?”

I thought about Kwon and his starring role in the egg-crushing vid I’d sent them. What a brutal image that must have been for them. I decided to leave that detail out of my explanation.

“I just put out the facts as I saw them,” I said. “They’ve been watching us, and they know the score. They know we’re pushing their enemy back for them. The machines have mistreated them horribly, and there was a tipping point that made them decide to act.”

I went on to briefly explain the desecration of their nests. I showed him a few stills of the crushed eggs and told him how the nests were being used by the machines to emplace automated weaponry.

“Ah,” Sloan said, eyeing the pictures. “They finally got mad.”

“Yeah, I guess so. A lot of wars are declared that way.”

About a mile ahead of us, I heard the ripping sound of heavy automatic weapons firing. I zoomed in with my visor, but could only see a few plumes of smoke.

“Looks like the recon team has made contact,” Sloan said.