Battle Station

— 14

We applied power only when we had to, braking hard at the end so as not to crash into the planet’s crust with killing force. When we did finally thump our boots down on the crunchy surface of silt and mud, we scattered as quickly as we could, taking cover. I eyed my sensors and the sky overhead, hunching my shoulders reflexively in my suit. I hoped they hadn’t prioritized our group of small, power-emitting targets. Just in case we were more important than we thought we were, I headed for distant cover. Everyone else had the same idea and we didn’t stop running in every direction like rats until we went to ground and crouched there, sides heaving, watching the skies.

I didn’t see anything nearby on my scope, my HUD or by visually scanning the skies. No flaring streaks of death rained down on my squad. Up above the cloud cover, however, it was a different story. Tight flocks of eight missiles sought one ship after another. The Fleet people were adjusting to this tactic. They regrouped themselves, and now moved into a cone-like formation. They arranged their ships so the open mouth of the cone was directed toward the oncoming source of fire. This provided every ship with a clear field of fire at the missiles as they entered the cone. The beams were intense, lighting up the air with blasts of radiation. The raindrops were instantly turned to plasma when the hot energy passed through them and turned into puffs of superheated steam.

The beams had to be held on longer to burn through the growing murk and the enemy countermeasures. Using less power for a longer duration beam was an effective way to overwhelm defenses and strike through to the missiles one at a time. Unfortunately, it slowed down the rate of fire. Twice, one got through and another ship was lost.

Part of me wished I was up there with the squadron of destroyers-only seven were left out of the nine, now. But I could tell their commander knew what he was doing. He had them all linked and firing in unison. Each missile was being struck from all sides by over twenty probing beams. Each one popped, then the turrets retargeted and popped the next. Following their orders, the ships pressed toward the source of the missiles, all firing as they went.

I turned away from the action overhead and waved to my men, who’d begun to gather themselves and their fallen equipment.

“Any casualties?” I asked.

“No sir, all accounted for,” Kwon answered.

I smiled. I’d asked for a squad of volunteers, and I shouldn’t have been surprised at who had jumped at the chance to go on this mission. “Kwon, let’s spread out and march toward the pit. Keep a good firing distance between each man.”

Kwon stumped off, shouting orders. I followed my squad and found Sloan at my side. He signaled me.

“What is it, Captain?”

“You should check out Marvin,” he said.

I looked around, not seeing the robot. Sloan pointed to a large mound of charcoal. I headed that way and found Marvin sprawled on the far side of the mound in a muddy puddle. Rain ran down over his metal body and pooled up on the dished out spots on his back. A half-dozen black tentacles squirmed under his body, making splashing sounds.

“What are you doing in that mud-hole, robot?”

“I prefer the designation artificial person,” Marvin said. He didn’t turn even a single camera in my direction as he said it.

I came forward grunting and levering my laser projector over to my left hand. These battle suits had exoskeletal strength, but this kit was extremely heavy and we’d added the most powerful generator kits we had. I’d expected to be fighting building-sized Macros, and I’d wanted the firepower to deal with them effectively.

I splashed into his mud-hole and peered over his shoulder-if you could call it that. The structure under his head was more of a sprouting point for a knot of three extra tentacles. My proximity earned me the attention of a single camera.

“You are obscuring my light source, Colonel Riggs.”

“Don’t you have a flashlight built into that owl-trap of yours?” I asked.

A second camera eyed me, then panned away. He seemed to be studying the watery mud under him, sampling it, zooming in on it and-I don’t know, but I thought he was tasting it, too.

“I don’t want to introduce unnatural radiation. It will spoil the specimen.”

“Have you gone naturalist on me, Marvin?”

“I’m testing this spot as a likely discovery zone. I believe biotic life should be flourishing here.”

“Microbes are everywhere,” I said. “I’ve probably got more of them in me than I do nanites.”

Three cameras. “No, you don’t. The nanites destroy most of them. Only the most beneficial are allowed to survive.”

“Humph,” I said. “I didn’t know that. Anyway, why are you looking for microbes?”

“Not microbes. Specialized biotic residue.”

I started to open my mouth, then closed it again. Suddenly, I figured I had the answer. He was looking for the smart bugs, the microbes we’d found when we’d last been in this system. They’d been held captive in a large gurgling tank of liquid on a captured Macro cruiser. I’d spoken to them briefly through Marvin-before the ship had been destroyed. We’d never encountered them again. As far as I knew, the only ones I knew about were the ones still living in Sandra’s body.

“Sir?” Kwon called, coming over the ridge. He stopped when he saw the two of us crouching over the mud and studying it with great interest. “Ah,” he said. “That must be a Macro footprint, right?”

“What?” I asked. “Uh, no. I don’t know. Marvin is looking for bacteria.”

Kwon’s helmet tilted a fraction, giving him a quizzical pose. “Well, Sloan sent me after you. He didn’t want to turn up his radio to call for you. He says to tell you we are still in a combat zone and his survival instincts tell him to keep moving.”

“Right,” I said. “Marvin, slurp up some of that water to study later. We are moving out.”

“I might damage the ecosystem.”

I gestured around us. “I hate to break this to you, but the Macros beat you to it.”

“No, I mean the tenuous thread these creatures have on life.”

I sighed. “All right. We are moving out. You can huddle down here as long as you like. If you don’t show up at the Macro dome, I’ll try to reprogram it myself.”

Marvin made a variety of protests, but we trudged away over the squelching mud. Finally, he came gliding along behind us. He didn’t say anything, but I suspected he was annoyed with me. That was just too damned bad.

We walked, rather than using our suit propulsion systems. Flying would have been a lot faster, but we wanted to maintain as low a profile as possible. Even Marvin barely used his repellers, relying partially on his tentacles to drag himself forward. He reminded me of some kind of snake-being I’d read about in Greek mythology-a gorgon, that was it.

Overhead, the battle still raged. My squad of ships had located the big Macro with the AA missile cluster. These battles had often gone badly for my ships in the past, but this time was different. It wasn’t only the Macros who’d made technological advancements in equipment and technique. My destroyers kept their formation and kept blowing up missiles until the machine ran out of ammo. Fortunately, there was only one of the machines. Once it stopped firing, they swarmed it and used their heavy laser turrets to cut it apart. It was quickly reduced to slag.

Having destroyed the local anti-air defenses, they moved on to finding the nearest harvesting vehicles. These they destroyed with as much flash and flare as possible. The idea was to keep all enemy attention on them-so the Macros would ignore us. So far, it seemed to be working.

They didn’t get too close to the pit itself, however. I wanted them to draw out the defenders from under their shells, and I didn’t want any them to engage any serious weapons the enemy may have unless there was no choice. The ships were there to raid and harry the enemy-not to plunge into open battle.

In all likelihood, however, the Macro dome had called out for help. In these situations production centers often would summon a large number of supporting troops to its side for protection. This had me worried about my squad. The ships could withdraw in seconds, but not us ground-sloggers. I knew my team could take on a single machine-maybe even two of the big ones. But we would be wiped out if we were caught out here in the open by a dozen metal monsters.

“Let’s step it up,” I called to Kwon.

He relayed the order, shouting with incredible volume. We began trotting through the mud. Our pounding feet sunk ten inches deep with every step. Each time I ripped my armored foot loose from the sucking mud, I was glad for my exoskeletal help. These boots couldn’t come off, and my legs had the power to keep pumping even if I was buried in a wall of mud.

Things stayed only mildly interesting until we reached the edge of the big pit. It was like a crater-a wound in the earth. The land had looked bad in the surrounding region, but it looked hellish down in that dark, spiraling hole. The air was a smoky haze. I could make out the shapes of Macro workers down below, resembling metallic insects at this distance. The light rain continued, combining with the hanging vapors to obscure the bottom.

“This looks promising,” I announced cheerfully. “Who wants point?”

“I’ll do it, sir,” Kwon said.

I frowned, but after looking at the rest of my unenthusiastic team, I finally nodded. I didn’t like having my First Sergeant risk himself on point, but maybe right now it was a good idea. “Okay, move out.”

Kwon took the first step-and slid down a muddy hillside. Without having his repellers on, he was off-balance. He handled it well, sitting down and sledding through the mud.

“Looks like fun,” I said, and headed after him. I managed to stay on my feet all the way to the bottom, but just barely. The rest of the troops followed.

We’d made it down to the first spiraling roadway. A dozen more hundred-foot drops lay ahead-or maybe it was two dozen. At some point, we couldn’t see any deeper into the hole. I peered into the shadowy darkness that lay below.

“That’s funny,” I said, staring at it.

Captain Sloan stepped up next to me. I couldn’t help but notice he was one of the last men to take the plunge down into this sinkhole.

“You’ve got a strange sense of humor, Colonel,” he said, eyeing the shifting cloud of darkness ahead.

“What the hell is that?” I asked. “I don’t get it. I figured the dome was buried down here, but now I’m not so sure. From space, this black cloud looked like smoke or vapor of some kind-up close, I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

Marvin slithered near and joined us. “It’s biotic in nature,” he said.

We all looked at him, except for Kwon, who was getting ready to slide down the next cliff of mud on his butt again. He looked back in my direction. “Best to keep moving, Colonel,” he said.

“Hold on a second,” I said, raising my hand. “I’m getting a feeling here, and I don’t like it. Marvin, what kind of bullshit have you gotten us into?”

“Your reference is unclear. This is not fecal matter, but a slurry of silicon, carbon and water, mixed with a variety of other elements. The biotic content is less than one percent.”

One percent biotic? That sounded high to me, but I shook my head and approached him. When dealing with Marvin, it was important not to get distracted by random statements, interesting though they might be. He had half a dozen cameras on me, a sure sign I was worrying him.

“Let’s get back to the part about that cloud. You say it is biotic in nature, and the last time I talked to you, I found you slurping up slime in some mud hole at the LZ. What do you know about what we are facing here?”

“There are few certainties. I have suspicions, which I’m trying to verify. In time, I will make a full report.”

“In time, we’ll all be dead-even you, Marvin. Talk to me now, before this team goes another step deeper into this hellhole. You tell me what you are holding back. What is it you don’t want us to know?”

Marvin had a camera on everyone in the team now. The rain still drizzled over our suits. His electric eyes focused and zoomed independently. I knew he was taking a reading of our collective mood. Apparently, he didn’t like what he saw, because he swung most of his cameras back to me and finally answered.

“The cloud ahead is biotic in nature. It is a life form, I believe. A mass made of many small parts. In a way, it is similar to a nanite formation.”

My helmet swiveled back toward the shifting darkness. It looked like thick smoke, but I supposed it could be more of a giant, gaseous jellyfish. “You’re telling me that thing is alive? It’s huge. Is it solid, liquid or gas?”

“None of those. It is more like a living plasma, or a living gel. Part gaseous, part liquid. Very little of it could be called a solid.”

Sloan lifted a gauntlet and pointed at the robot. “I have it!” he said. “It’s a mass of those microbes, the ones we found back on the Macro cruiser. Is that it, Marvin?”

“Good question,” I said, giving Sloan a nod.

“No,” Marvin said.

We all looked at him, but he didn’t volunteer anything more.

“Well?” I demanded. “Then what is it? If you want to press ahead with this mission, you’d better keep talking.”

“It’s a single organism, not a mass made up of a trillion individual cells.”

I grunted unhappily. Far from being like robots in old movies, Marvin was a tight-lipped miser with information, rather than a mechanical blabbermouth. “Okay, what the heck is it doing squatting at the bottom of this hole?”

“It is imprisoned here.”

I nodded. “Fine. Is there a Macro dome down there with it? Or was all that talk of a production facility in this location a trick to get us to come here?”

Marvin hesitated. “I don’t know.”

Half the men in the squad groaned aloud. Marvin swung his cameras from face to face.

“All right,” I said. “I apologize, everyone. Marvin, you are fired. When I get you off this world, I’m putting you into a hold on the Centaur stations where you can’t do any more harm.”

I pulled out my com-link and activated it.

Marvin slithered closer and a cluster of his cameras studied me. “What are you doing, Colonel Riggs?”

“What does it look like? I’m calling Fleet.”

“But we were to maintain long-range radio silence.”

“Not anymore. We are pulling out. I’m calling for our extraction from this garden spot you lured us into. Unless you give me a good reason to do otherwise, right now.”

“The Macro factory is probably down there. I calculate a sixty-two percent probability.”

“Sixty-two percent?” I asked. “That sucks, Marvin. That’s almost a coin-toss.”

“It’s closer to two out of three.”

I shook my head. “No, there is no ‘probability’. The factory is either down there, or it isn’t. What is the basis for your argument? Why do you think it’s here and not at the bottom of some sea?”

“The mineral exhaust and regional harvesting machine activity levels are far higher than normal in this region.”

“That’s it?”

“Also, the prisoner would most likely be in close proximity to one of the Macro Superiors.”

“What prisoner, and what do mean by Macro Superior?”

“Super-brains, I believe you called them. AI intellects.”

“Right. No wonder you wanted to come here. Is it mating season?”

“I don’t understand your statements, Colonel Riggs. They seem to be non-sequiturs.”

“Never mind,” I said. “You think there is a massive alien prisoner, a Macro factory and a Macro Superior all down at the bottom of this hole? When did you first suspect this?”

“As soon as I examined satellite imagery of the location.”

I sighed. This was often how it went with Marvin. He was deceptive and manipulative, but when you finally forced answers out of him, he gave them all at once. Somehow, that made it harder to be angry with him. His full confessions seemed to absolve him of his sins.

“All right. Where does this giant gelatinous being come from?”

“It is a one of the race-members of the species you most commonly refer to as ‘the Blues’.”

If I had possessed ten cameras of my own, I would have put them all on Marvin. Every trooper around us stared in shock. They all knew about the Blues, the theoretical race of beings we’d yet to find. They were the ones who’d let the Nanos and the Macros loose on the rest of us poor, unsuspecting biotic slobs.

“But that cloud isn’t blue,” Kwon complained. “It’s black.”

I walked to the edge of the second cliff and stared down at the shifting, translucent mass. It had to be huge-a mile across at least. Could such a thing be alive, even intelligent? I thought about what kind of life form might be able to survive on a gas giant world. I supposed it could be something like this-a massive volume of aerogel. It wouldn’t have enough mass to be crushed by the overwhelming gravity of the world. In a way, I supposed the Blues had to be something of very low density, or very high density. Our kind could not take the brutal G-forces.

“What are we going to do, Colonel?” Kwon asked.

I sighed and directed my laser projector toward the mass. “We are going down, First Sergeant. We are going to find out exactly what is at the bottom of this very odd hole.”