The assault ships, when we finally climbed into them, reminded me somewhat of my original hovertank design. I’d come up with the design back on Earth, with some of these same, shark-like contours. They were sleek and dangerous-looking.
When I reached the assault ship that had saved a seat for me, I barely had time to get the nanite arms to reach up and strap me in before it launched. I looked at the front wall, where beads of metal crawled. Each one indicated where a nearby ship was. The contact representing our ship was green, the rest of the assault ships were faintly yellow. The two big Macro ships were blue and oblong. I could see our green contact was the last one in the chain. We were late to the party.
Behind my ship, as I watched, hundreds of tiny contacts appeared. They were so faint and so numerous, they looked like rippling flaws in the metal wall. I knew they were not mistakes, or static. They were my men. Each man stood in a capsule, with his legs stiff, his body being pressed hard by acceleration. The capsules were little more than two foot-wide parabolic disks with a propulsion unit on the back and a skin of nanites covering the occupant. The tiny capsules guided themselves, but could be set for manual operations, in which case the marine riding it could guide the vehicle by leaning. The men already had several names for them: dishes, skateboards and flying saucers.
Inside the assault ship, dull metal finishes ruled. I’d put in control systems for every individual marine’s seat at the base of the nanite arms that served us as restraints. Normally, Nano ships were controlled by voice, interacting with the brainbox verbally. In this case, I didn’t want to fly my marines into combat with arms gripping them which they couldn’t release on their own. Combat conditions were hard to predict. The brainbox or the pilot could be taken out of the equation, or both. With my design, every man had some level of control of his own situation. If he tapped or kicked a bead of metal, the nanite arms would release him automatically.
“Any incoming fire yet, pilot?” I asked.
“Negative, sir,” she said. The pilot was Lieutenant Joelle Marquis. She was young and inexperienced, but none of that could be heard in her voice. Her words rang with calm authority and a slight, French accent. She was one of the Fleet people I’d brought along in case I’d needed to build a flying force at some point. On Helios, she’d been left manning the walls, but now her piloting skills were sorely needed.
Kwon leaned forward and waved to me, indicating he wanted to touch helmets. I immediately complied, wondering what my second in command might want to say in private. Since the assault ships were not pressurized, we could normally only communicate with radio intercoms. By touching our bulbous faceplates together, vibrations could be carried and voices therefore could be heard, but only by the two people in close contact. I found myself staring into Kwon’s big face, which was grinning. Being so close to another guy was disconcerting, but you got used to it.
“What is it, Captain?” I asked.
“She’s really hot, isn’t she?”
I stared at him. “Who?”
“Joelle,” he said flicking his eyes toward the front of the ship. “I love that frenchie talk.”
I snorted in disbelief. Kwon was a great marine, but he was like a big kid sometimes. I didn’t know if Joelle would go for a guy like Kwon, she was too good-looking and he was a lump in a battle suit. But I decided that if he was happy to dream about her, I was happy for him.
“Go for it, Kwon,” I said, “but wait until after the fighting, all right?”
“Okay, okay!” he said. Still grinning, he sat back. The nano-straps that held us all in seemed excited by his leaning and stretching. They shortened up their hold on him, all but pinning him to the wall of the ship. Nano arms were like mother hens when you were on a mission.
“Incoming fire,” the pilot said. Joelle’s words were calm, but I heard the tension in them. I didn’t blame her for being worried.
We began immediately swerving from side to side. I knew she was firing the lateral propulsion systems we’d rigged up, jinking randomly to avoid getting hit. The enemy had taken a long time to figure out they were in trouble. We were three-quarters of the way there. In another minute or so, the ships would have to flip the engines forward and decelerate or crash into the station directly.
I looked up at the screen. There was the station; it was huge and reddish-brown. It looked like small moon, but was oddly-shaped. Unlike a human structure, this thing was organic-looking in design. It was looped with tubes and swirling flanges. It looked more like a seedpod coated in cobwebs than anything else. I didn’t see any incoming fire on the screen. They must not be firing missiles at us.
A beam of light splashed into the ship then, having breached the thin hull. My visor darkened almost immediately. The intensity of the light gave me an instant headache. I thought for a second that one of my men had flipped off his safety and discharged his projector. I almost shouted a complaint, when I felt an impact against my right shoulder.
Centrifugal force pushed me into the man on my right, just as the guy on my left was being shoved up against me. I could feel the motion now, we were in a spin. My vision returned and my visor brightened. I could see all the men were caught up in the spin, we were doing at least three Gs of lateral force. The upper hull of the ship was gone. A hole had ripped through the nanite skin and I could see the stars whirling by.
“We’ve been hit!” shouted Kwon unnecessarily. “Orders, sir?”
I’d always known that these ships were sitting ducks if the enemy had their act together. The problem was, we couldn’t come in at a high enough velocity-not if we wanted to do anything other than ram the station. We had to slow down when we got in close. I cursed the Macros and their deals. They’d once again thrown away the lives of my men.
The spin slowed down as the ship struggled to control it. The ship was recovering, but I knew Macros tended to fire on a target until it was completely destroyed.
“Everybody out, we’ve got to expect another strike,” I said. “Deploy your skateboards, marines. The free ride is over!”
“What about me, sir?” asked the pilot. I was momentarily surprised to hear her voice-I hadn’t really expected her to survive.
Lieutenant Joelle Marquis. Young, kind of cute, with an accent that turned on Kwon. I hardened my thoughts. I couldn’t worry about saving her butt any more than the rest of us.
“Can you operate your ship, pilot?” I asked. Around me, twenty men scrabbled to escape their panicked nano straps, which clutched at them like the hands of frightened children. Each of them struggled to get out the disks they sat on and exit the craft through the gaping hole in the roof.
“I can fly,” she said.
“We need that big laser to drill into the station. Take it all the way in. Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I jumped out then, and Kwon followed me. I wondered if he hated me for giving the girl suicidal orders.
I stood on my disk and a rippling sheen of nanites grew out of it, bubbling up my body to finally stop at my neck. I could still see through my helmet visor to navigate. There was a flash behind me. I suspected it was the assault ship, taking another hit.
I couldn’t do anything about it, so I didn’t look back.
9
I’ve experienced a number of strange things in my life. Some of these things no one else in human history has ever lived through. But riding a dish-shaped skateboard through space while under fire had to be one of the wildest, even by my standards.