Battle Station

— 10

There’s no moment quite as exhilarating in a marine’s life as the first time his boots touch unknown ground in a combat zone. There’s so much noise, you’re blinded by fresh sights, even the smells assault your senses. It’s hard not to feel as if you are dreaming-but you aren’t, you’re really there. As a bonus, the unseen enemy is somewhere nearby, plotting your death.

We raced away from the landing pod, finding ourselves in an area of brilliantly green rolling hills. The grass was tall. Every blade was as wide as a man’s thumb and reached up past my waistline. A mile to my left was a forest of big, strange-looking lumpy growths-I suppose you could call them trees. They looked more like giant broccoli to me. Closer at hand on our right flank was a lake of icy blue water. Dead ahead the hills continued, a broad swathe of green. We were in a veritable river of tall grasses.

In the distance ahead, the grassy hills swept up to the edge of a trio of rocky mountain peaks. Those mountains were our destination. Somewhere behind them, the enemy had a major base. Marvin and the rest of our computers had calculated the odds, and they had determined this area to be the most likely location of an accessible Macro dome. As we couldn’t see the actual dome from space, it was assumed to be underground, or disguised in some fashion. Still, it had to be here. The machines kept marching in and out of this region, delivering raw supplies on a continuous basis.

All around my running company, more ships landed. They dropped their payloads then shot back up into space. We were among the first few thousand to come down.

“Head for the trees, we need cover!” I shouted.

After my orders were translated and relayed, the mass of the Centaurs wheeled left and bounded for the trees. I ran after them, but quickly had to take flight to keep up. They could run at a shocking pace, even with bulky kits on their backs. Under my boots the grass rattled and fluttered away from my suit’s repellers like green water.

I opened a channel to the Fleet people above. “Everyone in the first wave make it down okay?”

Miklos answered. He’d been catching up on current events for me while I was busy humping it after a hundred racing goat-troops.

“One pod had trouble Colonel-accidental weapons discharge,” Miklos reported.

“How many?”

“Six dead, ten wounded, sir.”

“That’s quite an accidental discharge!”

“We don’t even hint around about them lying sir-especially when we know they are. The Centaur Captain refused to let the transport take the dead and injured back up. They dumped their casualties on the grass and left them. They said something about serving the winds of-”

“Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted. “Sky, clouds, honor and all that. Well, I suppose they can at least enjoy dying here on their own planet. Any sign of incoming missiles?”

“Not yet sir, but it’s only a matter of time.”

Time. It was the one resource I never had enough of. The second wave was on its way down by the time I reached the protective cover of the broccoli-trees. I saw other units doing the same all along the landing zone. I’d given the individual commanders leeway in terms of tactics in the opening minutes of the drop. Everyone was to survive and move toward the target as quickly as possible.

Not one minute after we’d reached the tree line, I heard the snap and whine of incoming missiles. “Everyone down, seek cover.”

I threw myself flat, but noticed the Centaur troopers under my command seemed confused. They milled among the trees and directed their lasers toward the bulbous canopy of dark green pods overhead. I supposed they really didn’t know what to expect when under fire from an aerial bombardment. We’d done little with them in the way of training, other than equipping them with effective weapons systems and figuring out how to get them down onto the surface of this planet without killing each other. We hadn’t trained them in organized infantry tactics. There had been too many cultural and language differences, and most importantly, not enough time.

With all that said, lying down in the middle of a forest just didn’t make sense to them. They were herd animals that liked to run from danger, not hug dirt when it came. My order hadn’t been clear enough. I thought hard for a few seconds, muttering curses into the fallen, mushy pods that pressed up against my faceplate.

“I want every last buck to get his tail up close to a tree. Stand there and lean against it. Enemy fire is incoming. Move!”

I watched as they shuffled around for a few minutes in a tight group, then finally broke it up and went to separate trees. Part of the reason I’d given them the tree order was to break them up. They instinctively bunched up. I didn’t want a single lucky hit to come down and wipe out the entire company.

When the missiles did finally arrive, they missed us. The barrage peppered the grassy hills we’d just left behind. Orange flashes bombarded the open grasslands in a rippling pattern. Roiling white clouds shot up, and then moments later thousands of clods of black earth showered down. At least they hadn’t thrown a nuke-not yet.

Fortunately, my marines had been smart enough to clear the area immediately after exiting their pods. The machines hammered our empty LZ. I radioed Miklos, telling him to change the location of the next drop. He assured me new plans were in motion.

Then I jumped to my feet, calling for my Centaurs to follow. I charged in the general direction of the three mountain peaks. Behind me, the herd played follow-the-leader. It was a game they knew well.

We made good time, occasionally meeting up with other companies. We were to move as scattered, independent forces toward the mountains and regroup there for an organized assault. The plan had been left deliberately vague, as we hadn’t know exactly what we were in for until we put our boots on the ground.

Twenty minutes later, I was pleased with our progress. We’d made it halfway to the mountain peaks-a good ten miles-before anything went seriously wrong. At that point, we ran into one of their harvesting machines.

The systems the Macros used on this world were different than those I’d dealt with back on Earth. In the South American campaign, they’d churned out thousands of small robots that were essentially worker-ants for the colony. Here on this planet, however, they’d built much larger machines to do their harvesting for them.

The harvester we ran into was the biggest machine I’d ever had the pleasure of meeting while on foot. I’d seen its kind before, however. Back when Sandra and I had taken our ill-fated scouting trip out to the blue giant system we figured was probably Bellatrix, we’d met up with a mining robot on an airless rock full of metals. That thing had been rolling along on spiked spherical wheels and chewing up raw materials it found on the surface. This one had a similar look to it, but it had a cow-catcher sweep in front of the main maw. What it was doing, as closely as we could figure out, was digesting trees from the forest. It scooped them up into its maw like an electric shaver chewing on a man’s stubble. Chopping the trees off low at the base of the trunk, the organic material then ran up chutes and was chemically leeched and burned. Behind the machine, a massive black trail of charcoal as wide as a fresh-laid highway stretched out for miles.

We’d seen operations of this kind from space. Our reconnaissance didn’t show any of the harvested regions in this area, only virgin forests we’d planned to use for cover. My best guess was that the machine had been redirected here after learning of our invasion.

It really didn’t matter why the machine was there, what mattered was it was plowing right into my unit and it was incredibly big. I didn’t know what kind of armament it had, and I had no clue as to how we were going to kill it. But I didn’t let these details bother me.

“Spread out! Circle around behind the machine and shoot it in the rear. Aim for sensory equipment, joints and any weapons systems it might have.”

The Centaurs followed my orders-sort of. Rather than scattering as individuals or even squads, they broke into two groups which each swept around the machine on either side. I could tell by now they really didn’t like any orders that caused them to separate and act as individuals.

For my own part, I shot up directly into the air. None of my troops could perform this kind of trick, as they didn’t have full battle suits. I hoped it didn’t have an anti-air pod on its back-fortunately, it didn’t. The machine I’d met up with back in the Bellatrix system had ignored my scouting ship entirely. While this one was acting aggressively, it didn’t really have the capacity to do anything at range.

As my Centaurs flowed around its flanks, however, it did surprise us. Two side chutes flipped out. These were probably built to cut into groves of trees in hard-to-reach pockets near boulders and the like. Whatever they were for, they ate into my troops like lawn-clippers. A dozen or so Centaurs on each flank were separated from their hooves, in many cases from all four at once. Still alive, the flopping troops fell bleating into the threshing blades as they made a second pass. Blood fountained up and puffs of dark fur floated in the forest between the trunks.

The troops that survived flashed out with their weapons, burning the machine in a wild crisscross of beams. Vaporized metal puffed up from countless hits, but the machine seemed undaunted. Thirty seconds later, I was on top of the monster and most of my troops were behind it.

The harvester began a slow, laborious right turn. I could tell it was wheeling, trying to get its blades back into play. Apparently, it didn’t have anything in the rear area other than the exhaust system which laid out the charcoal byproduct. Another machine would probably come along eventually to pick up the material the harvester left behind-but by then I hoped to be miles away.

“Keep behind it, men,” I said. I realized even as I said it they weren’t men, but old habits die hard. “Keep shooting it in the ass. I’ll try to figure out what to do up here.”

The Centaurs did as I asked. Beams lashed the harvester’s hindquarters, to little apparent effect. At least no more of my troops were dying. Perhaps they felt it was dishonorable, not facing an enemy head on like two rams butting heads. But for once, they didn’t complain about that.

It occurred to me that although the harvester was no longer killing my company, it was successfully delaying us. Could this be the prelude to a more effective attack by military units? I had to disable this thing and get back on track. I thought about the single nuclear grenade I had on my pack. It seemed like a waste to use it now. I only had the one, and I’d hoped to use it on a more critical target.

Finally, I decided to try an old tactic. I’d had time to examine the harvester from a top view. There were certain data and power lines that looked familiar to me, and they all led down to a central nodule about a dozen feet from the ground on the right side of the machine.

“All right this isn’t working out. I want all of you to focus your laser fire on this box. Follow my lead.”

I put my beamer on the box, and let my goggles shade to full blackout mode. If the Centaurs were good at one thing, it was following the leader. More than fifty beams joined mine, and we burned through the module in seconds. Many of the thick cables were severed during the process as well.

That was it for the harvester. First, its spinning, spiked wheels stopped churning up dirt. Then the blades on the forward scoop stopped making chewing motions. Within a minute, the entire machine halted. I sensed it was still active, watching us from a dozen sensory devices. Moreover, I could feel the thrum of its central driving engine, the vibration still came up through my boots.

I wanted this thing dead, so we spent another minute or so burning the contents of its brainbox completely away. It was mildly satisfying. When the machine was a smoking wreck, we left it and pressed onward toward our goal.

We’d gone from being one of the lead companies to being one of the laggers. I pushed my team hard to catch up.

By the time we reached the foot of the mountain range, Miklos had reported to me that most of the teams were down. In the end, we’d fielded much fewer than the millions of volunteers we’d been promised by the Centaurs. I would have gladly put them all down, but I didn’t have enough delivery systems, or infantry kits. Putting them down without proper equipment would have been akin to murder in any case. As far as we could tell, the machines had exterminated every individual on the surface, and they weren’t about to change their genocidal policy now.

We’d landed about thirty thousand Centaurs, each team lead by one of my officers or noncoms. A few were led by private first class marines who’d I’d raised to the rank of Corporal for serving in this hazardous mission.

By the time all the companies had made it to the mountain range, we’d only lost about three percent of them-six marines and about a thousand Centaurs. It seemed unfair, but these poor guys had a way of dying in groups. Their natural herding instincts failed them in modern combat-at least in regards to survival rates. That said, they got the job done and rarely complained. The only queries I received from them came when we stopped moving forward to press against the enemy. In these cases, I explained the situation to them in terms they understood.

“We are massing up before pressing forward. We need more weight, more numbers. When we have all our strength together, we will overrun the machines in our thousands.”

This sort of talk always got them into line. They loved the idea of swarming the machines and burning them down. The enemy themselves were something of a surprise. They had missiles, good command and control and they fought gamely enough. But they lacked troops. Apparently, this system had been marked down as friendly in their book. We were in a state of peace, and therefore all production could be turned to harvesting resources.

I was surprised, as I thought perhaps our forays down to the surface at both poles would have made them switch their massive production systems over to military hardware. They hadn’t done so, but they were sure to now.

Consequently, our march to the enemy dome was relatively easy. We met up with a few hundred machines-mostly small worker units. These functioned well against unarmed civilians, but when faced by thousands of troops carrying heavy beamers, they were melted to scrap quickly. The bigger harvesters were more of a problem, but we’d figured out how to disable them.

Then there were the gathering units that resembled floating cities. These came along the black highways of partially digested materials to pick them up. They were monstrous, buzzing systems that apparently used massive versions of the repellers in our battle suits to fly. Once we figured out where the repellers were located, they were easy to bring crashing to the ground.

I gathered my thousands on the cliffs over the valley we knew must contain the enemy dome. I wasn’t happy with what I saw, however. Instead of finding caves that led down to the enemy production facilities, I found only a deep lake of still water that was barely above freezing. From this water, machines crawled in and out all along the shore line.

I compressed my lips and called Miklos. “Captain. Do you know what I’m seeing down here?”

“Yes Colonel, we are monitoring your suit video.”

“Maybe the stream isn’t clear up there, but what I’m seeing is a failure. The enemy dome must be at the bottom of this lake.”

“Are you sure, sir?”

“Yes, I’m freaking sure!” I shouted. “How am I supposed to take thirty thousand Centaurs into a frozen lake? They don’t even have vacc suits. They’d drown even before the Macros could murder them all.”

“It does look like an intelligence failure, Colonel.”

I took a deep breath. We’d come so far, all for the possibility of capturing a Macro production facility. We’d lost a lot of troops, time and given the enemy details as to our strength and tactics. But the mission was a failure despite all those lost assets on our side of the ledger.

“We spent too much time building up and not enough time doing proper recon. I have to take responsibility for that.”

“Excuse me, Colonel,” Miklos said. “I have Marvin here. He wishes to speak with you.”

“Put him on.”

“Colonel Riggs?”

“Yes, Marvin. Go ahead.”

“You have about three hundred marines in full battle suits. I’ll come down with you, if you like. If you can get me into that dome somehow, I’m fairly certain I can transfer full control of the unit to Star Force.”

Fairly certain. It sounded like my epitaph. Here lies Colonel Kyle Riggs, who was fairly certain he would survive his last campaign.

I thought about it while Marvin prattled on about Macro security protocols and transmission spoofing codes. I believed that he believed it could be done. But I wasn’t sure the Macros were going to cooperate. We had no way of knowing what they had down there. Maybe they’d held back their military hardware to protect the dome itself. Maybe they’d analyzed our intent and prepared a trap for us.

The real trouble was that the three hundred marines were the majority of the five hundred-odd human troops I had in the entire Eden system. If I lost them, I lost an asset I couldn’t replace. I would have to return to Earth and endure Crow’s sneering displeasure with no victories to speak of. For all I knew, Crow was on his way out here with a retrieval fleet. Doubtlessly, he’d been building new ships non-stop since I’d left him. I frowned fiercely and tried to push all thoughts of Crow and Earth out of my mind for now. I had a job right here that needed doing.

“No, I don’t think I want to take my men underwater again,” I said. “The risk is just too great. I went on a sea campaign once with thousands of troops-and we still pretty much failed. I’m pulling out.”

“But sir, what about the enemy dome?” Marvin asked.

“We’ll nuke it from orbit,” I said. “We’ll burn this lake until there isn’t a drop of water to hide under.”

“Our original plan was to take control of a Macro production facility.”

I thought I heard a hint of a whine entering his voice, but it could have been my imagination. I knew it was Marvin’s dream to poke and prod at a real Macro production facility. No one had ever done so for long and lived. It was just the sort of thing that got his imagination boiling.

“There are two more domes on this planet. This one was the easiest to find, but we’ll find another.”

“But sir,” Marvin persisted. “I must point out that-”

“Forget it Marvin,” I said. “Miklos, pull us out of here and drop your bombs.”

“Yes, sir.”