“It’s venting, sir,” came a voice. “This is Major Welter. I’m standing near the breach. It looks like a volcano is erupting.”
“Right,” I said. “Marines, hold your positions and try not to shoot one another.”
“They are charging in close, sir!” came an anonymous report. I heard sounds of laser fire and more shouting, much of it incoherent.
I felt I was losing control of the situation. The Macros had identified a critical weakness in our operational effectiveness. I figured if I lived through this experience, I would redesign our battle suits to allow marines to fight more effectively without visual input.
“Hold tight,” I said. “The gas is clearing!”
When it did clear, we shot the retreating Macros. They had dragged off a number of my men. We’d lost thirty marines. Only four of the Macro workers had been disabled. They lie in the passages, kicking spastically, repetitively. Like robot toys with dying batteries. They had the familiar metallic, headless-ant look. They had beam weapons mounted where their heads were supposed to be.
“Macro marines,” I said, “their shipboard fighters. There can’t be too many of them, but they are effective.”
I ordered the mass of my men into the ship now. I didn’t want them outside, exposed to incoming fire. I had reports of other Macro ships moving in the system. Only a few recon squads stayed up top on the surface of the hull, watching the skies and the invasion ship.
I decided to change tactics. This was taking too long, and I could not afford attritional losses. If more Macro ships got here before we captured this one, we would be helpless. I ordered the men to head off in company-sized forces in every direction. Someone was bound to discover the bridge or the engine room, and I felt sure the Macro crew wasn’t big enough to contain us all. We would overrun them with our superior numbers.
I took command of the company headed toward the engines. In the invasion ship, that had been the critical region I’d discovered when I was traveling through their tubes and chambers. If they liked to design their ships consistently, we might gain control over it by taking that area.
We saw some fantastic sights along the way. I traveled through chambers that resembled laboratories of some kind. One was filled with bulbous tanks that dripped solvents. Vapors filled these chambers, and I had no doubt the environment was highly toxic. Something like electrolysis was going on inside those bubbling tanks. Was it a power source or a weapons system? I had no idea.
When we reached the engine compartments in the aft part of the ship, I met up with real resistance. There were only four of their marines, crouching on the ceiling with their beam-weapon heads directed toward the entrance. They waited like patient cockroaches, and we didn’t disappoint them. We burned our way in from two sides of the chamber at once, and I sent a few marines in through the open hatch as well just to keep them honest.
It was a slaughter. Caught in a crossfire, the enemy marines fought to the death, but hardly managed to score a hit before they were beamed to smoking ruin. I took note of the fact they didn’t bother to retreat, not even in the face of hopeless odds. We must be getting close to the ship’s vitals.
“Keep moving,” I told my men, broadcasting to every helmet in the invasion force. “Don’t stop for anything. Not even if you are hit. When it becomes clear we are going to take the ship, they will not hesitate to blow up the whole cruiser.”
In the end, it was a close thing. The huge engines rumbled, vibrating the floor in the final room as we fought the dozen or so technicians who held it. We had to be careful here, I didn’t want our weapons to disable the very ship we’d fought so hard to take. It came down to pistols and knives against snapping pinchers in the end. They flicked out their snapping metal mandibles, ripping holes in suits, severing air tanks and flesh. Due to the almost non-existent gravity, blood floated and pooled in odd configurations on the walls and mixed with a dozen stranger liquids that flowed from the struggling Macros.
I saw a man in front of me go down. He had a knife in one hand, having lost his other weapons. The power cable to his generator was severed and floating. I lunged forward, pulling away from Kwon’s watchful grip. He cursed and followed me into hand-to-hand.
Fighting one of the machines this close up was terrifying. They were much worse than the Worms. They were not soft flesh, and they were bigger than your average Worm. A good fifteen feet long, the Macro worker had its back to us as it worked over the marine, who roared hoarsely as the thing diced his suit and flesh. It looked as if he were being attacked by a lawnmower. Shreds of material, nanite-impregnated or not, flew everywhere in an alarming spray. The marine still slashed with his knife, the monofilament edge removing flashing metal mouth parts from the Macro.
I tackled the thing, and it felt as if I had tackled an angry bulldozer. The metal surface didn’t give way a micron. It was not staggered by my weight or the impact of my flying assault. I was an insect hurling myself upon a careless being of gray metal.
I put my pistol onto a jointed section on its back where two sliding plates met. I pulled the trigger and held it down. A thin beam lanced into the metal, melting its way into the things guts. I didn’t have much hope of taking it out this way, however. It would take too long to bring it down.
Kwon came in behind me. His approach was more effective, and got a response from the monster. He put his monofilament blade up into a set of cables that controlled a rear leg. The leg lost tension and went sprawling and flailing. That entire end of the monster sagged.
The Macro left the shredded marine and turned, dragging the bad leg. When it realized we were holding onto its back and not letting go, it did something unexpected. It loaded up its legs underneath itself and sprang into the air.
I felt a huge surge of power. My first instinct was to grab and hold on, but I realized that was the wrong move. I let go.
The Macro surged upward like a grasshopper launching itself into flight. In this case, however, the ceiling was very close, and like a grasshopper in a box, it smashed into the roof.
Kwon, unfortunately, had held on. His bulldog instincts failed him, and he crashed into the roof of the chamber, crushed between the Macro’s metal body and the equally unforgiving ceiling. He went limp and tumbled away, falling in slow-motion.
Not knowing if he was dead or not, I broke my own rules of engagement and unlimbered my beam projector. I fried the Macro point-blank as it came down again.
18
The marine the Macro worker had been chewing on didn’t make it. He did live long enough to see us clear the room. But his guts were spread over a five yard area, and not even the nanites could patch him up again.
Kwon was out for a while, but came-to after some help from a corpsman. He had six cracked ribs and a fractured skull, but it was nothing one of my marines couldn’t recover from. I decided my next battle suit would have to be better designed with internal form-fitting foam to prevent injuries to marines who were tossed around in their armor. My current design stopped most penetration, but didn’t give enough padded protection from concussive damage.
Kwon dragged himself to where I was working on a bizarre control panel. I lifted my hand to clap him on the back, but thought the better of it.
“Congratulations on surviving,” I told him.
“Just don’t give me any more promotions,” he said, groaning.
“Don’t worry. Are those nanites itching?”
“Yeah,” he said, running his gloved hands over his chest and helmet. “This is worse than the time I got my foot chopped off. What are you doing, Colonel?”
“Exercising the first useful skill I ever learned: problem-solving.”
Kwon grunted.
“Identification, analysis, design, implementation,” I said. “The engineer’s basic steps. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to figure out this interface and make it work for me. It might take weeks or even years of study.”