Battle Station

— 8

I spent a full day dreaming up solutions to the Centaur transportation problem. My staff brought me their own ideas, which I listened to politely. For the most part, they were terrible.

“Drug all the Centaurs and land them in a base camp a hundred miles from their objective,” Sloan suggested.

I nodded and said something like “uh-huh”. That’s just what I wanted, a million or so semi-conscious mountain goats to care for. What would happen when a Macro missile barrage landed in their midst unexpectedly? Were my marines supposed to run away carrying a drugged goat tucked under each arm?

Miklos came up with a Fleet-centered idea: “Just bombard the domes from space with nuclear weapons, Colonel.”

I had to admit, that idea had more merit than the first. But we would have to manufacture thousands of missiles, and the enemy was well-defended against any space-borne assault. That’s why I had equipped these troops. I had planned to drop dirtside fast and deploy a beachhead, then press in against a dome before they could mass and stop us.

“It’s occurred to me, but I don’t think we have enough firepower. Even if we did, I don’t think I would want to unload it all on the Centaur planets. We are supposed to be freeing these worlds, not destroying them.”

Marvin had the most interesting idea of all. He suggested we go in with a small force, secretly operating as commandos. If we could get Marvin himself under one of those domes, he felt he could reprogram the machine to operate under our control.

I rejected everyone’s plan, but thanked them for their valuable input. I then headed back to my own ship to think. After about twenty hours of mulling it over, I became tired and frustrated. I did what I usually did under such circumstances: I drank a six-pack of beer. This move improved my mood dramatically.

Soon, I found myself in Socorro’s observatory. I hummed and admired the view. I spilled a few golden droplets on the ballistic glass surface. The chamber had always been icy cold, and the beer froze into hard amber beads on the glass.

I studied the planet below, so near yet so inaccessible. The chilly ice-cap on every crag was so white, and so bright it almost hurt to look at it. I tapped at the glass with my foot, and it clacked back at me. I frowned. What if…?

Bursting with a new idea, I rushed out of the observatory and called in my staff. It took them long minutes to assemble. They yawned and squinted at me, as it was the middle of a sleeping shift for most of them.

“How much ballistic glass do we have in the system?” I demanded. “I want a full accounting. I want to know about all of it.”

“I don’t know, sir,” Miklos admitted. “Not much. We don’t generally put windows into our ships, except to cover cameras. Most of it is probably in use as visors for our helmets. What do we need it for?”

“We’ll have to manufacture it, then,” I said, beginning to pace. “That will slow down our infantry kit production, but we don’t have any choice. I mean, what good are Centaur infantry kits if the troops all end up insane when we drop them, anyway?”

My staff exchanged confused glances. I waved my hands at them.

“Don’t you see? They want to see big vistas. They want skies and horizons. They don’t want to be blind in a box. They don’t want goggles or hoods over their heads.”

“Yes sir…” Miklos said, looking at me as I were as nuts as a Centaur.

“Well, we’ll give them that view, just for a few minutes, as we drop them down to the surface.”

“I understand your intent,” Marvin said. “It is ingenious-and if it works, it will prove how bizarre biotic mentalities truly are.”

I almost gave him an angry retort about machines that rebuilt themselves every day like fashion models, but decided there wasn’t time.

“We’ve got to try it first, of course,” I said. “We’ll rig up a new version of the landing pod with transparent material and drop a new group tonight.”

My staff looked concerned, except for Marvin, who looked excited. I could tell from the way he whipped his tentacles and cameras around he was curious about the experiment. Would it end as another horrible, bloody failure? Either way, it was new data for his hungry robot mind.

“Do you mean to give them a window, sir?” Miklos asked.

“Not just a window, man. I mean to give them a glass floor. Like my observatory. Something to look at, something to swallow up their eyes and keep them focused on distant horizons. How can anyone feel claustrophobic while standing on what looks like open space?”

“Sounds more frightening than being surrounded by solid walls,” Kwon said doubtfully.

I pointed a finger at him. “For you, maybe. But you’re not a crazy mountain goat. They don’t like walls. Anyway, it’s worth a try.”

Miklos and the others exchanged glances. “But we’ll have to ask another team to-to possibly sacrifice themselves.”

“That doesn’t matter to them. These people will do anything for the herd. I know them. They won’t hesitate to volunteer. In fact, I bet we get about a million volunteers.”

“But that’s not the point, Colonel-”

I turned on him. Maybe it was the beer that was still in my system, but I wasn’t in any mood for misplaced sentimentality. “Listen, Miklos. I know you want to do this the clean way, bombing our way through it. But that will take a lot of nukes, a lot of floating radiation clouds for decades to come and a lot of time and resources we don’t have. At any moment, a fresh Macro fleet could come sailing through a ring and slaughter these people by the billions. We’re going to risk their lives again, and we’re going to do it within the next few hours.”

Miklos looked down, and nodded. He looked back up again a moment later. “We only need a squad of them-just to see if it works.”

I almost let him have this one, but then I shook my head. “A full pod. I need real combat conditions. I want a hundred of them in there, in close quarters. If it doesn’t work, we have to know now, not when we’re in the middle of a live operation.”

Resignedly, my staff at last agreed. We broke up the meeting and went our separate ways. Within an hour, I was back aboard the landing ship, and we were sailing down to the planet. This time, I had us drop on the northern pole. It was closer to the enemy installations, and I knew they’d fire on us again, but that wasn’t the point. All I wanted to know is whether or not the Centaurs could handle it. The moment we touched down, we’d turn around and head back up into space-whether the Centaurs went nuts or not.

At the last minute, Sloan tried to give the Centaurs inactive weapons. I chewed him out and belayed his order.

“This will be a live-fire exercise, marine,” I said.

Grim-faced, we rode down from space with a fresh load of Centaur troops. I didn’t know if they knew what had happened to the last batch. I wasn’t even sure it would matter if they did know. These people were so self-sacrificing when it came to combat, they would suffer any indignity or danger to regain their homeworld-anything except dishonor, that is.

The descent was even worse this time. There was a storm system spiraling over the northern polar region. No one had bothered to tell me. I supposed they knew I’d just tell them to fly the mission anyway, that this was a test under adverse conditions. Maybe they even thought I’d wanted it that way. Rather than abort the operation, I pressed ahead.

We didn’t get hit by one buffeting wind shear-we were struck by at least four. The ship heeled and swerved sickeningly. Even with our dampeners, we were left floating around the ship. I felt like I was jumping up and down inside an express elevator-while the building was going down.

We watched the monitors, and the Centaurs were indeed showing signs of stress. They staggered in place and kicked at one another with their hind legs.

“Maybe we should tell them to put on their hoods and goggles now,” Kwon suggested. “We are almost down. If they go nuts, they are going to make an awful mess crammed in there like that.”

“I appreciate your input, First Sergeant,” I said.

He glanced at me and nodded. Everyone knew what that meant, when it wasn’t followed up by any commands to change anything.

Kwon looked away and muttered something.

“What was that, Sergeant?”

“I said: ‘We are still Riggs’ Pigs’”

I smiled. “That’s right.”

We came down in a screaming dive that pulled up short just as we touched down. The worst part was right at the end, when we moved from a tilted angle of descent to a flat-bottomed approach for the landing. The Centaurs were leaning with the ship, like someone riding on the back of a motorcycle. Even with our inertial dampeners, this final maneuver left many of them scrambling to keep their feet. Their eyes were wide and round and rolled in their heads. I had audio and video feeds hooked up, and there was plenty of grunting and bleating going on.

“They’re calling you names, Colonel!” Kwon said.

“I bet they are,” I laughed. All around me, the rest of my crew was smiling now, too. None of the Centaurs had lost it completely. Not a single one had discharged his weapon, burning and blinding his fellows. They were scared, but they were all in one piece.

We let them unload and walk around on the ice for about two hundred seconds before herding them back aboard. This was part of the test as well: after having endured the flight down, could they be convinced to reload on the pod and fly again?

The answer was a resounding yes. They bounded over one another to get inside the craft again. I smiled, seeing some of their flanks were shivering. Their breath blew in plumes of hot, white steam.

“It must be cold out there,” I said. “Look at them, eager to board again. Now lift us off quick, Miklos. The Macros must have anticipated this landing. The missiles will be here shortly.”

He needed no further encouragement. Soon, we were rising up into the clouds again. The surface of the world vanished in a pall of rushing mist.

When we returned to orbit, everyone was in a celebratory mood. “I knew you would figure it out, Colonel,” Kwon said.

I nodded, wondering if he really had been so confident. It was a natural thing to say, but I’d sensed a great deal of worry in the group before the mission. Now that everything had worked out, it was easy to say you’d had faith all along.

I suspected they’d doubted me after witnessing the previous failure. Perhaps that’s what made me the commander. A leader in a desperate war has to be willing to take risks-risks that could cost a lot of lives. That sort of decisiveness and responsibility just came with the territory.

After the test, I focused on logistics. We needed radioactives badly to keep producing infantry kits, and organic compounds to form polymers for the glass-bottomed landing pods. We’d cannibalized what materials that could be spared on board the Centaur satellites. We had to have a fresh supply.

Looking over our surveying reports from around the system, we found only one ready supply that wasn’t on the surface of one of the target worlds themselves. It was out at the single gas giant in the Eden System, orbiting among various moons that circled the huge planet. The supply consisted of a natural ring of dust and debris. Probably formed by a moon-on-moon collision ages ago, the broken up chunks were just right for feeding into the hungry maws of Nano factories. They digested small debris much more easily than big, tightly-assembled pieces. I dispatched two ships, all I could spare at the moment, to collect the materials we needed by scooping them out of the rings. The rings themselves were pretty to look at-I vaguely hoped we wouldn’t do too much damage to them. I shrugged a moment later. We needed the materials, and a pretty view wasn’t worth a single life to me.

The source was refined and effective. Soon, I had reports coming in of thousands of gallons of loose matter being caught in sweeping collectors. Still, the entire process represented a delay. I’d hoped to launch my attack within a week-but that single week was quickly stretching into a month.

“Good news, Colonel,” Marvin said, scraping the walls with his metal tentacles as he barged into my office.

“I could use some good news,” I said, straightening my back and turning to look at him.

“I have video of the missile impacts. May I bring them up on your system?”

I gave him permission, and while I frowned he showed me various satellite vids of flashing strikes on the icy region we’d first landed upon at the southern pole. The missiles plumed with vapor and left discolored craters in the ice.

I frowned at the vids. “I’m not sure what is so positive about these strikes. They seem accurate to me. They hit everything in the region. I can see now, they spread the strikes so that even if we’d tried to run, we could not have escaped the kill zone.”

“Exactly!” Marvin said excitedly. “Here, let me show you.”

He zoomed in on a crater in the ice. It looked to me to be much the same as the rest. “We’re able to get very high resolution levels, even from space. This was taken some ten minutes after the strike. Notice, that due to the high winds, the area has been largely cleared of obscuring smoke.”

“Yes, yes, Marvin,” I said. “But what is your point?”

“Right there, see that at the edge of the crater? Let me zoom-in closer for you.”

Marvin applied his writhing metal tentacles to the screen, making a spreading motion with them. Our point of view zoomed closer. It was odd, watching him do that.

I studied the scene. It took me several seconds, but then I saw it. A clump of fur blowing in the ceaseless winds. And something else. “Is that a buried hoof, Marvin?”

“Yes, I’m certain of it.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. “It must be the one we left behind. He must have run in a straight line-but he didn’t make it out of the blast radius in time.”

“A stroke of luck, to be sure,” Marvin said. “The Macros didn’t have to use so many missiles against such a small number of targets, but their thoroughness saved us this time. Did you have this result in mind, sir? Did it enter into your planning at some point?”

I stared at him with narrowed, baffled eyes. Marvin wasn’t good at reading human expressions, so I was fairly sure he didn’t realized how dumbfounded I was. “Let me get this right: you are happy this poor creature was blown apart?”

“Naturally, Colonel Riggs. When you first decided to break the pact between the Centaurs and the Macros, I was certain that you had made a mistake in your timing. I now see you had thought of every detail. How can the Macros know their agreement with the herd people has been broken, if there is no evidence? They have obliterated it.”

As he spoke, I felt a chill go through me. I’d sort of forgotten about the agreement between the Centaurs and the Macros. Any Centaur spotted on the planet surface was a violation that would allow the Macros to destroy their vulnerable satellites. With all the fighting that had gone on, I’d figured that deal was null and void now. But there was no real reason to assume that. We are at war with the Macros, but that didn’t mean the Centaurs were classified as rebels yet.

“I’m further impressed that you were so certain of this outcome,” Marvin went on.

“What makes you think I was so sure we’d get away with this?”

“Why-because you didn’t put any kind of defensive systems on the satellites themselves. The Macros could use their missiles to destroy them at any moment, and yet you were unconcerned. Was that done to prevent them from deducing your true intentions?”

I stared at him for a second before nodding slowly. I got it now. If the Macros had realized the Centaurs had set foot on the planetary surface, all bets would have been off. They would have been free to break their deals and destroy the satellites at will.

“Sure,” I said, my voice slightly shaken. “That’s exactly why I did it that way. Why give them a clue what I had planned for them?”

“Well played, Colonel Riggs.”

“Uh-huh. Marvin? Could you tell me the next time you foresee a problem like this, rather than trusting my judgment blindly?”

“Even if it requires interrupting you?” he asked.

“Even then.”

“I’ll reset those thresholds in my neural chains.”

“Excellent,” I said. I stared at the tabletop, which still displayed the fragmented Centaur. If that guy had been a better runner, he might have been responsible for the extermination of his entire species.

I corrected myself almost immediately: then I might have been responsible for the extermination of his entire species.

“One more thing Marvin…”

“Yes, Colonel?”

“Get Miklos on the com-link. We’re cancelling all further trips to the surface for Centaurs from now on. They aren’t going down there again until we launch an all-out attack.”

“Good thinking, sir.”