Men shouted, one screamed. The Macro had him and was tearing at his suit. He couldn’t get his guns into line with it. The other men fired further back along the monster’s metal body. Kwon joined me and we took the chance, firing deep into its guts, figuring if we didn’t the marine would be dead anyway. Some of those flashing tools were drills that could dig through armor and bore into the meat of a marine very quickly.
Four concentrated beams did the job. The Macro crashed down, twitching and whining with straining servos. I stepped up, calling for a ceasefire.
“All right, that’s it boys. Just make sure there aren’t two of them inside this thing.”
The marines dug much more gingerly after that. No one talked about removing their helmets anymore. I checked out the marine who’d been grabbed by the Macro. His armor was scratched and dented in spots, but the plates had held. The Macro hadn’t been able to get to my man’s flesh. Almost as significant, I found the private had managed to wrestle with and twist away two of those numerous flailing limbs. Employing his exoskeletal strength, he’d managed to damage the Macro as much as he was being damaged, even in hand-to-hand combat. I was impressed.
The single enemy Macro was the only one in the missile. I nodded to myself. It made a strange sort of sense. What better way to make a missile intelligent than to put one of your technicians aboard? Macro missiles were really kamikaze spaceships. They reminded me somewhat of my own men in battle suits. They just took it to the logical extreme, using their own troops like suicide bombers.
The warhead, when we found it, was inoperable. I wasn’t surprised. If it had been repairable, the technician Macro would have set it off. There wasn’t much to learn other than that. The missile had a single large warhead, an engine not unlike a small ship engine and a Macro technician as a pilot. A human pilot would never have survived the impact, but steel alloys were much tougher than flesh.
“There it is, Kwon,” I said, kicking the smoking ruin of metal. The Macro was pitted with laser strikes. “Take a good, long look.”
“Here’s what, sir?”
“The first Macro to invade Andros Island. I have a feeling it won’t be the last.”
-20-
We’d survived their opening salvo, but the battle was far from over. We had about thirteen hours of breathing time before the next stage began. When I say ‘breathing time’ I mean a sweating, scrambling time during which we repaired our facilities and dug in as best we could.
I released about ten percent of our constructive nanite reserves to build more underground bunkers. I’d originally assumed our non-combatant personnel would be safe in villages located in more remote locations around the island, but I no longer believed that. Andros was about 2300 square miles of tropical paradise, mostly uninhabited even now that Star Force had taken it over. But the kind of toe-to-toe nuclear combat I’d seen today could easily devastate the entire landmass.
Accordingly, we spent a lot of our time letting crawlers dig holes and dumped barrels nanites into them with orders to form walls. When the nanites formed a roof of liquid metal and it had time to take solid form, we dumped the dirt back on top of the new structure. These new bunkers weren’t very strong, really. They were like beer cans buried under a few inches of dirt. They couldn’t take a direct strike, but they were much better than standing on the surface.
One area I was highly concerned about was my not-so-secret base on the western side of the island. I had a large number of my factories there, sitting inside sheds. Each of these sheds formed the basis for a laser turret. These were soon to become targets and might well be knocked out. The laser turrets had been intended to protect the duplication factories, but now I realized the turrets had become a danger to their existence by making them into targets.
We did the best we could with the time we had. I dragged the factories out into the forest, dug holes, filled them with nanites and buried them again. From an aerial viewpoint, it was highly dissatisfying. The factory locations were easily marked by fresh earth. Running out of time, I ordered the marine garrison there to put one man into every laser turret and one man into every sealed bunker with the factory. The rest went around the area spreading patches of earth to make fake bunkers. We ran out of time when the garrison had managed to dig about six simulated bunkers for every real one. I was less than pleased. If the enemy cruisers hung up above, freely bombarding the site from orbit, it wouldn’t make any difference if there were three hundred bunkers for every factory. The Macros would keep firing until every interesting inch of the island was a blackened crater.
I kept these thoughts to myself and returned to our deep command post under the Fort Pierre headquarters building. Sandra was down there with Major Sarin, and I was glad to see neither of them had yet killed the other. Every time I left those two alone, I worried. Sandra was far more dangerous and impetuous, but Jasmine had a sidearm at all times and she was sneaky. She was the quiet kind, the sort of woman you didn’t even know was in the room most of the time. I knew that if she decided to make a move some day, she would just draw and fire and that would be it. No speeches, no nothing.
Sandra was the opposite. She was all flash and fire. You always knew she was coming and what she was thinking—but you could never be sure if she was mad enough to really do something serious or not.
Kwon stumped down the metal steps after me. In his battle suit, even the nanites building the floors seemed to dent in and regret their existence under this heavy tread. We removed our helmets and joined the women. The four of us stood around the computer table, watching the Macro fleet decelerate overhead.
The enemy loomed over the Indian Ocean, slipping into Earth orbit. They bore down on us out of the east, and like burrowing animals in the shadow of a hawk, we’d done our best to vanish underground.
“They are over Africa now,” Kwon said, stating the obvious. “How long?”
Major Sarin tapped one of her clocks, and made a flicking motion with her fingertip. A new clock spawned and shot across the table, appearing to spin. It came to rest in front of Kwon. He chuckled at the cool graphical effect.
“Eleven minutes,” he said, and stopped chuckling as meaning of that number sunk in.
I turned back to the big board. The dreadnaught was still in the lead, and if anything the train of cruisers behind it had hugged up closer to the big ship. Maybe they figured they would be protected in her wake. I hadn’t done battle with a dreadnaught yet, so for all I knew they were right. We watched as the fleet passed Africa and began the long glide northwest over the Atlantic toward our island. They were clearly planning to halt over Andros and decelerated continuously as they came.
A signal beeped. “It’s General Kerr, Colonel,” Major Sarin said.
“Open the channel.”
“Riggs?” Kerr’s voice rang from the metal walls of the room.
“Here, sir.”
“Not for long, by the look of it. Do you want our help? Is this when we launch our ship-killers?”
“I don’t want you to do that, sir,” I said. “Let Star Force handle this for now. If you launch from the states, they will know you are in this fight. Miami is a much softer target than my island. They don’t see us all as a single, unified enemy at this point. Don’t give them the opportunity to change their minds about that.”
“I understand your plan, but do you really think they will let you guide them into your guns? To break themselves on your single fortified position?”