The building had indeed been leveled. Of all the buildings scattered here and there, it had withstood the harshest pounding. I supposed Macro thinking was behind it. They knew our leadership was posted here, so they’d tried to obliterate the area.
I looked around the place. Not much was left standing. The landing pits had even suffered a pounding. The only place I really cared about was the officer’s mess, which was still partially intact. They had excellent food, and I was hungry.
“Hey look, Sandra,” I said. “They nailed our bungalow, but on the bright side, they only took out half the restaurant.”
“You can think of food now? What if they come back? What if they fire their missiles? Can you see them, out there in the sky over the ocean?”
I followed her uplifted finger and I did see them. It was strange to see so many ships in Earth’s sky. Dark, arrowhead shapes hung over our earthly sea. The day was clear except for drifting smoke. There was a slight haze, but the ships were so large and numerous you could not mistake them for what they were.
I called to Barrera and asked him if he could manage the clean-up without me. He assured me his staff was already on top of the task. I believed him. There were emergency operations going on all over the island, of course. Crews were digging people out, fire truck sirens warbled in the distance and the medical people were looking haggard. But I’d learned a long time ago to take a moment to rest whenever it presented itself. Star Force could run itself for a few hours, I decided.
“How long do you think we have?” Sandra asked me suddenly.
I removed my helmet and looked at her. She had already taken hers off. Dark flowing hair ran over the top of her armor, catching on the bulging plates at her shoulders.
“What do you mean?” I asked her gently.
“Before they come out of that trench. Before they crawl up onto our island to wipe us out.”
The cool beach breezes dried my sweat. The smoldering craters around us stank of burnt charcoal and dust. I hugged Sandra then, armor to armor. I think I surprised her, but she didn’t resist. Our battle suits scraped and groaned slightly at the pressure.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I plan to go down there and hit them first.”
She studied my face. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. I really shouldn’t be.”
I expected her to become angry and try to talk me out of it. But she didn’t. Maybe she thought I was right, and it was the only thing to do. Or maybe she realized that I would do it anyway. In any case, I didn’t bring it up again. We walked through the smoking mess that had hours ago been a tropical paradise. I was sad, rather like walking through the ashes of one’s own home.
“Let’s see if the officer’s mess is still serving,” I suggested.
She agreed and we headed toward the sagging doors. One wouldn’t budge, having been folded down by the building when it leaned forward like an old man that’s taken a hard blow. I forced it with my armored hands. The metal screeched and groaned as it came reluctantly open.
Inside, we found the officer’s mess serviceable, if abandoned. Kwon and his team were in the area, digging people out of their bunkers. Most of the base personnel had survived. We had drinks until the kitchen people showed up. When they finally did, we were pretty well lit. With big smiles, we welcomed them to the facility, still wearing our battle armor.
The cooks gave us odd, sidelong glances. They looked away quickly when we returned their gaze. I didn’t care. I hammered the table until it dented, and demanded a good meal. I didn’t care what it was, as long as it was hot and tasted good.
After awhile, they came up with a shrimp dish they called camarones salvajes. It was a seafood plate full of wonderful flavors. Shrimp, marinated octopus, calamari and mussels, all mixed with black olives, roasted peppers and tomato. There was other stuff in there I couldn’t identify, but it all tasted hot and good.
We polished off a bottle of wine, but I made sure I didn’t reach the point of actual drunkenness. Sandra became loud and silly, and when we finally left the place, I think the staff was glad to see us go. I gave them a tip they wouldn’t soon forget and my first thought was to lead my girl back to our bungalow. We headed that way, but soon were reminded our home wasn’t in the best condition. It was demolished, smashed to sticks by a strike on a nearby building.
“Hmm,” I said, realizing I wasn’t going to get laid in this place anytime soon.
Sandra gave a deep sigh, but she didn’t start crying. I think before our campaign against the Worms and the long journey home fighting against the Macros, she would have broken down. Now, she understood that things were just things. As long as the people you cared about were alive, crying wasn’t worthwhile.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said, then led me down to the sea.
It was getting dark now, but when we took off our battle suits and slipped into the waves, they were very warm. I looked off down the beach and saw a lot of dead sea creatures on the sand. All the hits in the water had killed thousands of fish. I turned her away from the washed up bodies.
“Why here?” I asked.
“Because those damned turrets can’t see us now,” she said. “I want to have some fun before you fix them all and they stare at me again.”
I laughed, and as the darkness fell we enjoyed ourselves in the waves. The water still felt warmer than usual, almost hot, but I’d checked my Geiger counter before we went out there. It registered increased activity with a mild amount of clicking. It was nothing a couple of Star Force marines couldn’t handle.
-23-
About thirty-six hours later, a fresh dawn broke over Andros. The radioactive clouds had dissipated, brought to Earth by a light drizzling rain. I stood in my battle suit alongside a good five thousand of my comrades. We were organized in tight units, because radio transmissions were going to be our biggest problem. I’d spent the last day and a half coming up with solutions.
The normal means of communications underwater consisted of either sonic signals—essentially shouting at one another with directed vibrations, or very low frequency radio. Of the two, VLF radio was much less workable. Conductive seawater was not a good medium for radio transmissions of any kind, but with long wavelengths and huge antennas it could be managed over distances of several hundred yards. Unfortunately, using low frequencies meant really long antennas—much longer than a man was tall.
We had the opposite problem with sound. It traveled too far and worked too well. A good loud noise under the ocean, such as a dolphin’s clicking, carried quite a distance. Whale songs went the furthest, in some cases thousands of miles. I didn’t know how sensitive the Macros were to underwater sounds, but I figured our clanking along in armor was going to be noisy enough.
In the end, we decided on a hybrid strategy. We would use sound only for longer range communications. After all, it worked pretty well for the whales. We used radio for close, whispered conversations between soldiers in the same unit.
I built a brainbox attached to a directional hydrophone it could manipulate and had a non-com in every unit carry one. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked. The biggest problem with this sort of communication was the lack of security. If the Macros were listening, they would hear our command chatter. Accordingly, I ordered each team to maintain sonic silence until the battle began, barring some kind of disaster.
Every company had to operate independently under this model, due to isolation. We had suit radio, but that didn’t work very well under the waves. A man’s normal shouting voice on the beach had more range than our radios did at the bottom of the ocean. Separating into companies of one hundred marines, we each had a geographic location we were to get down to. We weren’t sure where the enemy was in the trench, but we were going to have to find them on foot. It was a shotgun approach, but I didn’t know what else to do. We’d tried getting aerial photos and using sonar, but hadn’t seen much down there. Anyone who has searched deep water for a shipwreck can tell you it’s easier to find a rock on the Moon than find an object at the bottom of the sea. Essentially, you had to go down there and look around.