I watched the men with a surge of pride. I’d help build them up, and they were rushing eagerly to invade a world we’d never even seen up until this moment.
The big doors at the back of the cylindrical Macro transport split to form a cross of lurid red light. The cross widened and yawned as the four leaves spread open. We’d been hiding in this tin can so long, everyone was blinking at the unaccustomed light.
The mountain was directly ahead of us. I could see only the base of it, filling my view of the world. It was like a reddish-brown wall of crumbling stone. A wall so tall it had to have been built by the hands of gods.
“The bottom leaf has touched down, sir,” said Captain Sarin.
“Go! Hovertank group one: Go, go go!” I shouted into the com-link. Every hood in the taskforce buzzed with my words.
The first line of hovertanks surged forward as if goaded. They swept out of the hold and immediately separated into two groups of three, heading off to either side of the transport.
“Should we release the second squad, sir?” asked Major Robinson.
“Let me see the feed from the hovertanks first,” I said.
We watched the screens. Three hovertanks split into two groups and vanished. The view from the command tank was relayed to a window in front of me. I dialed for clarity. The image was jumpy as the tank swept around the Macro transport in a widening circle. I saw and heard laser fire.
“What are they shooting at? Turret view!” I said.
I caught a glimpse of a dead bug, a worm-like thing that closely resembled the creature I’d killed on the dissection tables. Its back was burned away and steamy vapor rose from the carcass. It appeared to be unarmed.
I heard more turrets firing. Red digits floated above the various hovertanks on the screen, rapidly flipping to new values as the computers recorded and displayed their hit-miss ratios.
“Reset those turret scripts. Put them on defensive-fire, not aggressive-fire. Our mission here is to destroy resistance, not perform genocide.”
I flipped through the different views. “Who set those tanks to autofire?” I asked.
Major Robinson lifted a hand—the hand transformed into an accusing finger which pointed at me. “It’s still your basic script, sir. Those things aren’t human, they tripped the software as enemies. Just as you would have wanted if they had come up on the beaches of Andros Island.”
I hissed a long breath through my teeth. He was right. If those things didn’t qualify to my AI as alien and possibly hostile, I didn’t know what would. I recalled back on Andros Sandra had freaked me out a little bit with her idea of having kids plant bombs at the base of my beam turrets. Taking an approach of letting the other guy shoot first was too dangerous, I’d realized…. I had written the turret scripts to identify suspicious alien attackers and to fire first. At the time, I’d been thinking of Macros sneaking up on my laser turrets, but now these seemingly harmless locals had set off my software.
“Okay, mistake number forty-two. Someone write that one down, please.”
Running this high-tech army was a lot like programming, I realized. Except that with each error I made, things died.
-44-
We had all our hovertanks out and positioned, forming a circle around our perimeter. I made sure the Macro transport ship was inside the perimeter and made it clear it was a priority for defense. Without that ship, none of us would be going home.
About half my marines were on the perimeter while the rest worked on unloading. Within two hours the landing site had transformed into a semi-fortified encampment. We used the nanites to turn the ground under us into a barrier by weaving themselves into the soil. We’d practiced this anti-tunneling nanite script back home. I’d come up with it after the Brazil campaign, but at that time I’d been thinking about slowing down the Macro burrowing machines. The effect of the nanites was to harden the soil into a pad beneath us. It wasn’t as tough as concrete, but it was fast and took virtually no effort on our part. Onto this pad of woven soil, we began the lengthy process of unloading nearly five hundred huge bricks—each of which was about twice as heavy here as they had been on Earth.
We used about a tenth of our bricks as walls, forming an inner security zone. This wall had gaps, and didn’t go all the way around the Macro ship. We placed and locked our bricks together, connecting several rocking outcroppings into what was roughly a hexagonal pattern. This was the core of our safe zone, and we stacked the rest of the bricks inside it, three layers deep.
The surface temperature in daylight was around a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit. Our suits had air conditioners and the nanites did their best to reflect the heat, but everyone was sweating within twenty minutes of our arrival.
I stood on top of a pile of boulders that made up one corner of the wall of bricks. Around me, a dozen marines aimed their rifles into the desolate terrain. Captain Sarin had been wrong—this was no garden of greenery. Everything was washed out with reddish light, making all colors blur into shades of orange and brown. There was vegetation—mostly stumpy growths that looked like they belonged at the bottom of an ocean. There were ugly, gray sponges and even uglier bulbous, tan things that resembled mushroom caps the size of pickups. And there was moss everywhere. Lots of moss.
“Sir?” asked Sergeant Kwon, crunching up to me. I noticed his feet sank deeply into the moss and the soil beneath. We were all twice our normal weight, and that put Sergeant Kwon into the seven hundred pound range, plus gear. He bore it all naturally, however. He looked right at home on this heavy world. His thick, layered body and round bear-like features seemed natural here.
“Good to be on solid ground again, isn’t it, Sergeant?” I asked.
“Yes sir,” he said, looking around and frowning.
He didn’t look terribly happy to be here. “What’s the matter?” I asked him.
“This place, sir. What do we call it?”
“Doesn’t have a name.”
“I know. But it should. No man should die in a strange place that doesn’t even have a name, sir.”
I looked at him. I nodded, finding his logic unassailable. “Right you are, Kwon. Do you have a name in mind?”
“Never went to school much, sir,” he said.
“How about Helios?” I asked.
“What’s it mean?”
“Helios was big in ancient Greece. He was the Sun Titan—sort of an early sun god.”
Kwon looked up at the huge, red star. It was dimmer than ours; you could stare right at it without burning your retinas out of your head. But it filled about three times more of the sky than our brighter yellow star did.
Kwon nodded. “Helios. Okay.”
I watched him stump away. I wondered how many of us would die here, and if any of the dead would feel any better about it now that the place had a name. Maybe Kwon would.
Our next surprise came when the Macro transport quietly lifted off. Some of my men had to leap for their lives off the ramp, which closed slowly like a giant lamprey’s mouth. They scrambled off the triangular wedge of metal and gaped up at the ship as it closed the hold in which we had spent many long days. Once the great doors were closed, the ship rose slowly into the atmosphere and went to join the last cruiser in orbit.
“Guess we’re stuck here now, sir,” Robinson buzzed in my ear.
“Yeah. I think I’ll build a summer cottage in those hills to the west.”
“Do you think they’ll come back for us, sir? Once the mission is finished?”