Conquest

-11-

A few days later I had all thirty one of my factories producing improved models of my new battle suit. The suits took about three hours to produce, but they didn’t take much in the way of specialized materials. After two steady days of production, I had about five hundred of these specialized suits. I’d already taken volunteer marines and set up specialized crash-training courses.

Crow came to watch me lead a company out on the beach a mile or so south of Fort Pierre. He stood on the beach with his arms crossed as we flew over the waves, shot hot lasers into the ocean and practiced diving through the resulting plumes of steam.

Finally, Crow signaled me impatiently. I ordered Kwon, who was assisting me in the training, to continue to lead the troops through maneuver and fire exercises. After that, they were to run ten miles through hip deep water and back again through the forest.

I landed near Crow with a spray of sand. He wore black-out goggles that clashed with his sunburned skin.

“What’s up, Jack?” I asked him. “News from Venus?”

“Nothing, I’m glad to report. But I’m here to find out what the hell you are up to.”

I waved back with one clanking arm toward the company flying over the ocean. As I did so, two of my men slammed together and went into spins. One shot down into the ocean, causing a fountain of steaming water to shoot upward. The second caught himself and managed to keep flying.

“Good work, marine!” I roared the winner over the com-link. “Now, pull your buddy out of the surf. Tell him he owes you a beer.”

I turned back to Crow. “I’m training these men to use their new suits. They are tricky to control, especially while in flight, as you can see. The key is to get a feel for the suit as an extension of your own body. To be the suit, so to speak. It’s rather like learning exactly where the bumper of your car is even when you can’t see it.”

“Are you expecting to go up there and parallel park with the Macros?”

“No, sir. I’m expecting to destroy the enemy.”

“With this lot? With a pack of marines in medieval armor? Have you gone mad, Kyle? I expected you to use our destroyer design to manufacture a dozen new destroyers for me.”

I removed my helmet and shook my head. Sweat flew in a spiraling spray. The heat-dissipation units inside these things needed a little work. I hadn’t turned on my air-conditioners yet, I didn’t think I should have to given that we were only working in the tropics. Space—especially any region of space closer to the sun than Earth—was going to be a lot hotter than this beach. But I’d thought wrong. The exoskeletons created excess heat as they moved, probably due to unforeseen friction and the use of servos.

“I forget you weren’t out there on our campaign,” I told Crow.

He stiffened his expression immediately. I knew he took any reference to his absence on my last big mission as some kind of suggestion of cowardice on his part. That didn’t bother me, so I kept on making the references.

“Just tell me why this isn’t a gross waste of time and resources.”

“Don’t think about them as marines, Jack,” I said. “Think of them as one-man fighters. And think of your destroyers as carriers for these fighters.”

He tilted his head, looking at me. “You plan to attack the Macros with infantry?”

“You saw me do it when that diamond of four Macros hit Earth a few weeks ago.”

“I’d thought that was a wild act of desperation.”

“No…it was a tactic. And a damned effective one, too. These Macro cruisers aren’t well designed to stop boarders. They have only one single large cannon and a number of missile ports with a limited supply of missile salvoes. They can’t easily deal with large numbers of small attackers.”

Crow nodded. I could tell I had him thinking, but he still doubted me. “Still sounds to me like an excuse to build up your marine forces when it’s obvious we need every ship I can get.”

“Every one of these suits is a ship. A very small one, but I already have five hundred of them. I’m training the pilots right now, as you can see.”

I gestured with a sweeping arm out to the frolicking marines. They were doing stabilization maneuvers now. These consisted of one marine flying laterally, then being struck or spun around by other marines. He was to steady himself and get to his goal point as quickly as possible without touching the waves. The mission of the rest of each squad was to dunk the man running the gauntlet. There was surge of hooting and roaring laughter each time a man spun out of control and slammed into the ocean.

“You are putting these clowns on my destroyers?” Crow asked. “I’ve got them set up for a crew of six, just as our design required originally. One helmsman working with the brainbox to maneuver the ship. One communications officer to coordinate with the rest of the fleet and a squad of supporting frigate-class vessels. Add three gunners and a commander, and you have all the crewmembers the ship is built to hold.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “You forget I helped come up with the design, Jack. We don’t need three gunners, first of all. The original design was to allow each of the three guns to target three different enemies and engage them at once. I now reject that operational theory. These enemy ships are all larger than our vessels. We will have to put dozens of lasers on one cruiser to bring it down. We only need one gunner per ship.”

Crow shrugged, conceding my point. “All right, a crew of four then.”

“Three,” I said. The commander and the communications officer are redundant. The small ships get by with two men each now, we only need three to run one of the bigger destroyers. In truth, we’ll probably have them all link up under a single commander to combine their firepower without any operational delay relaying orders from ship-to-ship.”

He glanced at me unhappily. “You’ll make a lot of Fleet people unhappy if you don’t let them fly.”

“Too bad. When we have a large enough number of ships, they’ll get their chance.”

“So, I gather you want to fill the other spots aboard with your trapeze artists, here?”

“Yes. More than that, I plan to put troop pods with small platoons on every vessel. Sixteen total marines in battle armor. They’ll greatly increase the firepower of your destroyers.”

Crow sniggered at that. “How the hell do you get around to believing that?”

I keyed my headset. “First Sergeant Kwon.”

One of the marines out blazing over the waves slowed and lifted himself above the rest. His suit ran with green lights and glowing LED lines. His suit was easily the largest one out there.

“Here, sir,” Kwon said.

“I want a live-fire exercise. Drop a grenade on its lowest yield setting one mile east. Put it down in the water, set to go off on contact with the bottom. Move like its real, First Sergeant. ‘Cause it is.”

“This is a live-fire exercise!” Kwon roared without a moment’s hesitation. “Code November! I repeat, code November!”

My helmet suddenly buzzed with a cacophony of voices. Everyone was shouting at once. Most of the marines whirled around and headed for the shore. Most of the company wore suits with red streaming lights, designating them as grunts. The green-lit non-coms and the few blue-lit officers hung back, plucking floundering men out of the waves. Some were airlifted by two or more others, dragged out of the water and up onto the beach.

“What the hell are you up to, Kyle?”

“Just watch,” I said.

About a minute after the last man was out of the water, the flash came. The black outline of a single marine battle suit came tumbling through the air back toward us. The flashed loomed and grew behind him. It was brilliant even by the standards of men accustomed to high-powered laser fire.

When Kwon returned to the beach, there was a lot of cheering and back-slapping. After a blast of wind howled by, Crow walked down to the waves and stared at the swelling mushroom cloud. A fountain of steam a thousand feet high ballooned out at the bottom ocean.

When we could talk again, Crow turned to me. “You really are a crazy son-of-a-bitch, Riggs. Isn’t there some kind of international law about tests like that in water? What have you got against fish, mate?”

“Not really keen on the taste,” I said. “But I had to test the new grenades at some point. They are like our mines, but designed for the purpose of rupturing a cruiser hull with a single strike. We learned a lot aboard those cruisers, and one thing I’ve got down to a science is the amount of force it takes to dig through one of those hulls. Every one of my shipboard assault troops will carry one of these specialized grenades. If even one of them gets close to a cruiser—boom.”

Crow took off his goggles and squinted at me a new air of respect. Either that, or he thought I was insane.