“Advance!” I shouted, ordering my men into the smoking breach. Whatever its cause, we had an opportunity to invade the cruiser, and anything was better than sitting on the hull waiting to die.
We rushed inside, not knowing what to expect. Marines were all around me, charging forward. We moved forward employing leapfrogging maneuvers, one team crouching and aiming down a corridor while the next advanced quickly to a new spot providing some kind of cover. We’d made it a few hundred paces before we met with resistance. A pair of Macros caught us, showing up at each end of a long tubeway. Everyone fired at once. The light flared up, darkening my visor. I was in the middle of the pack, I aimed my pistol but didn’t fire as there were marines between me and the enemy, blocking my shot.
Sandra pushed me down again then. I heaved back up, snarling. “Stop doing that!”
She pointed upward mutely. A hot glow had appeared overhead. The Macros were burning down to us from an upper deck. The two at either end of the hall were firing, and then drawing back as our beams spat return fire at them. Two marines were hit, but not dead. They howled and cursed in my headset.
“Let’s pull back,” I shouted. “This is a trap.”
Hot beads of molten metal dripped onto my suit and sizzled there. Sandra and I looked up just as the ceiling opened. A piece of metal like a manhole cover clanged down between us. A Macro nosed through. It had a short-ranged weapon attached to its head section. I’d seen the type before. They normally did ship-repairs and were more akin to welders than warriors.
I fired at it, and it withdrew with a scarred thorax.
“Is it alone?” Sandra asked.
“I think so,” I said.
Sandra did an unexpected and impressive thing then. She sprang up through the hole over our heads. Now, we are all nanotized with strength superior to that of normal humans. We could do things no one back on Earth could manage, such as ten foot leaps up into holes. We would not normally perform this action, however, with an unknown number of enemy waiting on the other side of said hole.
“Wait!” I shouted after her, but she was already gone. I saw her heel for a second, and then nothing. I wondered in horror if I was going to be treated to watching a Macro tear her apart after going through hell to keep her breathing this long. I didn’t hesitate, but I did curse as I sprang after her. I couldn’t let her face whatever was up there alone.
By the time I struggled through the hole and fired my hand beamer into the Macro’s face. After a second, I took my finger off the firing stud. The Macro was already dead. I looked around wildly, but it was the only one up here.
Sandra was on its back, grinning. She had slashed open the thing’s back and used the fantastically sharp edge to sever the wires that connected the cpu in its thorax to the rest of its body. This combat technique was in our manual and our training discussions, but I couldn’t recall having ever seen anyone do it before.
“Stop worrying,” she said.
I stared at her for a second. “You’ll get yourself killed going off by yourself.”
She made her lips pout. “I doubt it,” she said.
I shook my head and jumped down into the corridor again. I had to call up to her twice to get her to join us.
“Let me go off and scout,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going lose you the same day I got you back. Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get you out of that coma?”
“For all I know you kept me sleeping and worked on lining up my replacement,” she said.
I stalked away from her angrily. While we’d been occupied with the Macro in the ceiling, my men had taken out the other two. We pressed ahead toward the engine room. Overall, resistance was light. The ship had no marines, as they had apparently all been used in the invasion attempt against us. We were up against the equivalent of mechanics and gunner’s mates. The crew fought tenaciously, but there were only about thirty of them and they hadn’t been built for personal combat. After less than an hour, the ship was ours.
38
All in all, this cruiser was in better shape than the last one had been when we managed to capture it. The belly turret was still intact. The left side underneath the nose had a hole in it, but it wasn’t as big as the last gaping breach had been. Jolly Rodger had yawned open, having lost the entire front section of the hull. There was less internal damage as well, as the Macro crew hadn’t been able to put up as stiff of a fight.
I wished I could say the same for my marines. We were down to less than ten percent of the number we’d left Earth with. They celebrated in desperate relief when we took the ship, but it was almost a maniacal sort of celebration. They had no booze, but they leapt into the air, whooped and slapped at one another, the nanotized equivalent of a hard high-five. For a few minutes, they bounced off the walls like ping pong balls. This exuberance quickly passed and most of them slumped down on the deck plates, exhausted by so many long days of fear and stress. I knew they needed some time off, but I wasn’t sure I could give it to them.
I gathered my bridge crew in the engine room, as we had done aboard Jolly Rodger. Everyone was there except for Major Sarin, who was still recovering from Sandra’s love-tap, and Major Welter who had stayed at his post and piloted Jolly Rodger to the end. I put his name down for a posthumous commendation-if any of us survived long enough to give it to his family.
“We are in the home stretch now, people,” I told my crewmen.
They smiled wanly. Even Sandra seemed more relaxed now. Killing that Macro with a knife had really settled her down. I made a mental note to try not to piss her off in the future. I didn’t have much hope in that regard, however.
“I need a volunteer to work the control console on this engine. At least, I need someone to turn on the brakes.”
Gorski looked doubtful. “That won’t be easy, sir,” he said.
“Why not?”
“There isn’t just a simple on-off switch on this thing. You have to work all the controls at once. It is more like landing a helicopter. I think the Macros built the interface with their group-mind as a basic assumption. They expect a half-dozen interface points to be touched at once most of the time and any operation takes input from all of them in combination. They simply didn’t automate the process.”
“I know something about automation,” I said. “Explain this to me.”
“Well, the Macros aren’t humans, sir,”
“I’m well aware of that, Captain.”
“They are very inhuman. We build our interfaces for our own physiology. Eyes that focus on a single point of the screen. Hands that can touch two areas, plus separate fingers that are only capable of reaching so far. The Macro interface was built for creatures with a dozen eyes and hands, essentially. They seem complex to us, but to them it probably seemed quite simple.”
I shook my head, walking up to the screen. It wasn’t flat the way our touchscreens tended to be. It had slightly convex curvature to it. I reached my hand toward it, but hesitated. Right now, it was in a locked setting, which was blasting us along on a preset course. We didn’t know where that course would take us, but we had to have direct control.
“How did you figure out these details, Gorski?” I asked.
“I spent days in Jolly Rodger’s identical engine room while Major Welter poked around with the system. We both studied the autopilot with interest. What we really need is a new autopilot to fly this thing.”
“Captain,” I said, “we have to have control over this ship. We don’t even know where it’s going, and I want to turn around and pick up whoever we can back in the Helios system.”
Gorski became pale. “Back through the ring?” he asked. “That will be a lot harder than just putting on the brakes.”