“They drew us out of our defensive perimeter, just as we did to them. Damn it.”
I sensed a light touch through my armor’s feedback system. Sandra was close to me. “We won, Colonel,” she said.
I rotated my helmet toward her. “Not yet, we haven’t. We’ve repelled an assault, yes. But their fleet is still at least sixty percent effective. They can siege us now if they like and wait for reinforcements to attack again. We need every asset we have.”
She nodded, her face falling. She looked back to the screen. I knew she had only been trying to cheer me up, but I wasn’t in a cheerful mood right now. They’d almost taken us out in one rush. The worst thing was they’d just learned their missiles were still effective. If they used them in the next assault, we would be in bad shape.
Sandra frowned at the screen. “What are they doing now?”
“They’re dropping something, Colonel,” Major Sarin said. “Into the sea.”
I turned back to the screen and peered at it. I opened my gloves to handle the screen more gently and ran my fingertips over the cracked glass. There they were, about twenty miles offshore, dropping huge objects into the water. The ocean fountained with each splashing impact. It looked as if their ships were laying eggs of some kind.
“Which ships are those?” I demanded. “Barrera, which ships are dropping objects into the water? Are they dropping bombs on the U. S. subs out there?”
“I don’t think so, sir,” Barrera replied. His voice scratched for a moment as the connection fuzzed, then came back. “The ships making the drop have been identified, sir. They’re invasion ships, Colonel. All six have dropped a large object in that area.”
“That’s the trench,” I said.
The region was known as the Tongue of the Ocean, a deep gash in the sea that separated Andros from New Providence. The hundred mile long region reached depths of six thousand feet.
“What the hell are they dropping?” Major Sarin said.
“Macros,” I said.
“Invasion forces?”
It looked all too familiar. I recalled the first Macro ship that had made it past our little Nano ships years ago. They had dropped payloads on Argentina. In the end, they had destroyed an entire continent.
“Yes,” I said, staring.
“I didn’t know they could operate on the sea bottom,” Sandra said.
“Neither did I.”
-22-
Within a few hours, we knew the full truth. The enemy had not only dropped unknown large objects into the sea, these objects had vanished into the oceanic trench off our eastern shore and sunk to the very bottom. I could only imagine the activity going on down there on the deepest seabeds of the Caribbean. While their fleet hovered far above like watchful parents, perhaps they were setting up domes of force and factory complexes to produce the monstrous foot soldiers of the Macros. Hundred foot tall robots I’d had nightmares about for years.
There could no longer be any confusion about the enemy’s intent. They’d tried a direct assault, but when their losses had grown too high, they’d broken off and shifted to Plan B. Like colonies of ants, they would build their invasion army and when they came again, we would face a combination of invasion and bombardment.
“We have to assume they’ve set up six factories on the bottom of the ocean,” I told General Kerr. He was the lucky recipient of my first call since the withdrawal.
“What? What are you talking about, Riggs?”
The General was out of the loop as far as direct input from the battle was concerned. The Macros had blown down all his satellites in the region as they came in, methodically popping any orbital object in the local sky like light bulbs.
“Down in the trench, sir,” I said. “The invasion ships dropped their payloads to the bottom of it.”
“No, no, no, Riggs. You have to be mistaken. Macros are land animals.”
“They don’t need to breathe, sir. They’ve unloaded six factories onto the bottom of the trench and they probably intend to invade after they build up their forces.”
“You listen to me, Riggs,” General Kerr said. “You told me to hide my subs down there to keep them safe.”
“Yeah. Not a good spot, as it turns out. The Macros have apparently decided that’s also a good locale to hide their breeding equipment.”
“Just like that, huh? Scratch one half of the U. S. nuclear sub fleet? Now I suppose you want me to withdraw them.”
“I apologize sir, but that’s not why I’m calling.”
“What do you want, then?”
“You have a number of attack subs. I believe they are equipped with nuclear-tipped torpedoes—”
“Now, you just hold on a second—”
“I need them to seek out the enemy in the oceanic trench, General.”
“That’s suicide.”
“If they get set up and begin churning out those big invasion machines, we’ll be overrun.”
“I can’t order my subs in—even if they had nuclear torpedoes, which I’m not confirming or denying. I can’t communicate with the subs when they are that deep. We’ll have to wait until they come up to shallower depths and can receive VLF signals. Do you think the Macros know they are down there with them?”
I thought about it. “Probably not, sir. But I can’t be sure as to their underwater sensory systems.”
“What are you going to do, Riggs?” Kerr asked me after a pause.
“I think we’re going to have to rebuild here first. The trouble is, when they do come, they will be coming up out of the sea. Laser fire doesn’t penetrate more than a few yards into the ocean. They will be able to march in extremely close before they surface. We won’t be able to engage them at a distance. Worse, the laser turrets on that entire coastal zone have been knocked out.”
The more I thought about it, the more I realized we were screwed. The Macros were going to churn out troops on the bottom of the sea—something I’d never realized they could do. They would use their fleet of cruisers to cover them from any kind of aerial assault. If we were going to go after their undersea base before they built a robot army and overran us, we would have to do it by walking on the seafloor, just as they were.
“Well,” General Kerr said, sighing, “I’ll work on getting the approval I need to use those subs again. You work on a way to get rid of those underwater factories. Lord, when the press gets hold of this there will be a panic in Miami. The entire population of the planet has been traumatized by the last invasion. Every continent fears a Macro dome building an army nearby like an anthill. They are going to go ape when they figure out what the machines are up to.”
I was barely listening to Kerr. To me, his problems seemed petty in comparison to my own. I had six giant factories in the sea next to my base, each no doubt was already churning out workers to gather the required materials to build more and more Macros.
We broke off the discussion and I stressed and mumbled over the computer table until Kwon tapped me on the shoulder. Fortunately I was wearing armor, otherwise his metal-wrapped finger would have broken my collar bone. I turned to him, and nodded.
“What is it, First Sergeant?”
“We’ve done it, sir.”
“Done what?” I snapped. I was tired and worried.
“We’ve dug ourselves out of this hole.”
“Ah, good,” I said.
I followed him up toward a glimmer of distant sunlight. Sandra trailed behind us. Together, the three of us stepped out into the ruins that had once been Fort Pierre.
“Those damned machines,” I said.
“Our headquarters building is gone, Kyle,” Sandra said. “Your new office, that awful orange carpet…all gone.”