“Don’t think about them as marines, Jack,” I said. “Think of them as one-man fighters. And think of your destroyers as carriers for these fighters.”
He tilted his head, looking at me. “You plan to attack the Macros with infantry?”
“You saw me do it when that diamond of four Macros hit Earth a few weeks ago.”
“I’d thought that was a wild act of desperation.”
“No…it was a tactic. And a damned effective one, too. These Macro cruisers aren’t well designed to stop boarders. They have only one single large cannon and a number of missile ports with a limited supply of missile salvoes. They can’t easily deal with large numbers of small attackers.”
Crow nodded. I could tell I had him thinking, but he still doubted me. “Still sounds to me like an excuse to build up your marine forces when it’s obvious we need every ship I can get.”
“Every one of these suits is a ship. A very small one, but I already have five hundred of them. I’m training the pilots right now, as you can see.”
I gestured with a sweeping arm out to the frolicking marines. They were doing stabilization maneuvers now. These consisted of one marine flying laterally, then being struck or spun around by other marines. He was to steady himself and get to his goal point as quickly as possible without touching the waves. The mission of the rest of each squad was to dunk the man running the gauntlet. There was surge of hooting and roaring laughter each time a man spun out of control and slammed into the ocean.
“You are putting these clowns on my destroyers?” Crow asked. “I’ve got them set up for a crew of six, just as our design required originally. One helmsman working with the brainbox to maneuver the ship. One communications officer to coordinate with the rest of the fleet and a squad of supporting frigate-class vessels. Add three gunners and a commander, and you have all the crewmembers the ship is built to hold.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “You forget I helped come up with the design, Jack. We don’t need three gunners, first of all. The original design was to allow each of the three guns to target three different enemies and engage them at once. I now reject that operational theory. These enemy ships are all larger than our vessels. We will have to put dozens of lasers on one cruiser to bring it down. We only need one gunner per ship.”
Crow shrugged, conceding my point. “All right, a crew of four then.”
“Three,” I said. The commander and the communications officer are redundant. The small ships get by with two men each now, we only need three to run one of the bigger destroyers. In truth, we’ll probably have them all link up under a single commander to combine their firepower without any operational delay relaying orders from ship-to-ship.”
He glanced at me unhappily. “You’ll make a lot of Fleet people unhappy if you don’t let them fly.”
“Too bad. When we have a large enough number of ships, they’ll get their chance.”
“So, I gather you want to fill the other spots aboard with your trapeze artists, here?”
“Yes. More than that, I plan to put troop pods with small platoons on every vessel. Sixteen total marines in battle armor. They’ll greatly increase the firepower of your destroyers.”
Crow sniggered at that. “How the hell do you get around to believing that?”
I keyed my headset. “First Sergeant Kwon.”
One of the marines out blazing over the waves slowed and lifted himself above the rest. His suit ran with green lights and glowing LED lines. His suit was easily the largest one out there.
“Here, sir,” Kwon said.
“I want a live-fire exercise. Drop a grenade on its lowest yield setting one mile east. Put it down in the water, set to go off on contact with the bottom. Move like its real, First Sergeant. ‘Cause it is.”
“This is a live-fire exercise!” Kwon roared without a moment’s hesitation. “Code November! I repeat, code November!”
My helmet suddenly buzzed with a cacophony of voices. Everyone was shouting at once. Most of the marines whirled around and headed for the shore. Most of the company wore suits with red streaming lights, designating them as grunts. The green-lit non-coms and the few blue-lit officers hung back, plucking floundering men out of the waves. Some were airlifted by two or more others, dragged out of the water and up onto the beach.
“What the hell are you up to, Kyle?”
“Just watch,” I said.
About a minute after the last man was out of the water, the flash came. The black outline of a single marine battle suit came tumbling through the air back toward us. The flashed loomed and grew behind him. It was brilliant even by the standards of men accustomed to high-powered laser fire.
When Kwon returned to the beach, there was a lot of cheering and back-slapping. After a blast of wind howled by, Crow walked down to the waves and stared at the swelling mushroom cloud. A fountain of steam a thousand feet high ballooned out at the bottom ocean.
When we could talk again, Crow turned to me. “You really are a crazy son-of-a-bitch, Riggs. Isn’t there some kind of international law about tests like that in water? What have you got against fish, mate?”
“Not really keen on the taste,” I said. “But I had to test the new grenades at some point. They are like our mines, but designed for the purpose of rupturing a cruiser hull with a single strike. We learned a lot aboard those cruisers, and one thing I’ve got down to a science is the amount of force it takes to dig through one of those hulls. Every one of my shipboard assault troops will carry one of these specialized grenades. If even one of them gets close to a cruiser—boom.”
Crow took off his goggles and squinted at me a new air of respect. Either that, or he thought I was insane.
-12-
The Macros played statue out there in orbit over Venus for seventeen long days and nights. Then one hot, sunny afternoon everything changed. By that time, we’d begun to relax a fraction. I think it’s only human nature to do so. How long can a person keep their bloodstreams full of heart-accelerating adrenalin? How long can one remain sleepless and worried? At some point, I believe the mind and the body naturally become immune to a threat that sits and waits. I imagined that if a tiger sat beside a watering hole, motionless for days, the animals would eventually come to ignore it. Perhaps the monkeys would even sit upon its back and preen. That was the moment a wise predator would make its move.
We’d stopped worrying every minute about the crouching Macro fleet. We all knew they were out there. We knew they were waiting for something. A signal, a mistake, or perhaps an aggressive move on our part. Speculation on what would make them act ran rampant through the base and the media outlets of the world. Nightly news and talk-shows discussed little else. In the end, it was the arrival of a single, final ship that changed the game.
“Colonel Riggs, sir,” Major Barrera buzzed in my helmet. “We have a problem.”
I was down at the landing pits and it was midday. The sun rode high overhead and blazed upon my back, as it tended to do in the tropics. I’d handed over the job of training assault troops to Kwon and others who were already more talented than I with the new battle suits. I had achieved a passable level of skill, and decided to leave it at that. There were simply too many other duties to perform.
Today, my duty was a happy one. Crow had managed to complete construction of a second full wing of nine destroyers. He brought them in and put them down in nine landing pits at the edge of Fort Pierre. Eager crews rushed to the new vehicles and boarded them excitedly. They held scripts in their hands and went through the rote routine of ordering their ships to take new names and accept their new masters.