Conquest

-20-

We’d survived their opening salvo, but the battle was far from over. We had about thirteen hours of breathing time before the next stage began. When I say ‘breathing time’ I mean a sweating, scrambling time during which we repaired our facilities and dug in as best we could.

I released about ten percent of our constructive nanite reserves to build more underground bunkers. I’d originally assumed our non-combatant personnel would be safe in villages located in more remote locations around the island, but I no longer believed that. Andros was about 2300 square miles of tropical paradise, mostly uninhabited even now that Star Force had taken it over. But the kind of toe-to-toe nuclear combat I’d seen today could easily devastate the entire landmass.

Accordingly, we spent a lot of our time letting crawlers dig holes and dumped barrels nanites into them with orders to form walls. When the nanites formed a roof of liquid metal and it had time to take solid form, we dumped the dirt back on top of the new structure. These new bunkers weren’t very strong, really. They were like beer cans buried under a few inches of dirt. They couldn’t take a direct strike, but they were much better than standing on the surface.

One area I was highly concerned about was my not-so-secret base on the western side of the island. I had a large number of my factories there, sitting inside sheds. Each of these sheds formed the basis for a laser turret. These were soon to become targets and might well be knocked out. The laser turrets had been intended to protect the duplication factories, but now I realized the turrets had become a danger to their existence by making them into targets.

We did the best we could with the time we had. I dragged the factories out into the forest, dug holes, filled them with nanites and buried them again. From an aerial viewpoint, it was highly dissatisfying. The factory locations were easily marked by fresh earth. Running out of time, I ordered the marine garrison there to put one man into every laser turret and one man into every sealed bunker with the factory. The rest went around the area spreading patches of earth to make fake bunkers. We ran out of time when the garrison had managed to dig about six simulated bunkers for every real one. I was less than pleased. If the enemy cruisers hung up above, freely bombarding the site from orbit, it wouldn’t make any difference if there were three hundred bunkers for every factory. The Macros would keep firing until every interesting inch of the island was a blackened crater.

I kept these thoughts to myself and returned to our deep command post under the Fort Pierre headquarters building. Sandra was down there with Major Sarin, and I was glad to see neither of them had yet killed the other. Every time I left those two alone, I worried. Sandra was far more dangerous and impetuous, but Jasmine had a sidearm at all times and she was sneaky. She was the quiet kind, the sort of woman you didn’t even know was in the room most of the time. I knew that if she decided to make a move some day, she would just draw and fire and that would be it. No speeches, no nothing.

Sandra was the opposite. She was all flash and fire. You always knew she was coming and what she was thinking—but you could never be sure if she was mad enough to really do something serious or not.

Kwon stumped down the metal steps after me. In his battle suit, even the nanites building the floors seemed to dent in and regret their existence under this heavy tread. We removed our helmets and joined the women. The four of us stood around the computer table, watching the Macro fleet decelerate overhead.

The enemy loomed over the Indian Ocean, slipping into Earth orbit. They bore down on us out of the east, and like burrowing animals in the shadow of a hawk, we’d done our best to vanish underground.

“They are over Africa now,” Kwon said, stating the obvious. “How long?”

Major Sarin tapped one of her clocks, and made a flicking motion with her fingertip. A new clock spawned and shot across the table, appearing to spin. It came to rest in front of Kwon. He chuckled at the cool graphical effect.

“Eleven minutes,” he said, and stopped chuckling as meaning of that number sunk in.

I turned back to the big board. The dreadnaught was still in the lead, and if anything the train of cruisers behind it had hugged up closer to the big ship. Maybe they figured they would be protected in her wake. I hadn’t done battle with a dreadnaught yet, so for all I knew they were right. We watched as the fleet passed Africa and began the long glide northwest over the Atlantic toward our island. They were clearly planning to halt over Andros and decelerated continuously as they came.

A signal beeped. “It’s General Kerr, Colonel,” Major Sarin said.

“Open the channel.”

“Riggs?” Kerr’s voice rang from the metal walls of the room.

“Here, sir.”

“Not for long, by the look of it. Do you want our help? Is this when we launch our ship-killers?”

“I don’t want you to do that, sir,” I said. “Let Star Force handle this for now. If you launch from the states, they will know you are in this fight. Miami is a much softer target than my island. They don’t see us all as a single, unified enemy at this point. Don’t give them the opportunity to change their minds about that.”

“I understand your plan, but do you really think they will let you guide them into your guns? To break themselves on your single fortified position?”

“That is my sincerest hope, General.”

“Sounds loony to me. If I was their commander, I’d change my plans.”

“Fortunately, you are not,” I said with feeling. “The Macros are computers, sir. In most cases, computers do not reevaluate their decisions once they’ve been made without new input. Don’t give them that input.”

“I’ll await new input myself, then. Either from you, or the enemy.”

“One more thing, General,” I said before he disconnected. “I suggest you order your subs to submerge as deeply as you can. There’s a trench to the east of Andros called the Tongue of the Ocean. Send them down there. They’ll have a hard time burning that deeply into the ocean with a laser.”

“What if they fire more missiles at you? The tridents worked so well last time, I figured you were going to be begging us for a repeat performance.”

I shook my head and leaned against the computer. “Not this time, sir. They look like they’re coming right down to sit on us. If they fire their smart missiles from directly above, we won’t be able to stop them with a counter strike. We would have less than thirty seconds to react. Too short a time. I’d prefer you conserved the subs. We might well need every asset we have before this is over.”

Kerr was quiet for a moment. I suspected he was calculating our odds of survival and not coming up with good numbers. I’d thought of this detail as well—the possibility the Macros would come in and unload the rest of their missiles on us at point-blank range. I didn’t think they would do it—but I couldn’t be sure. They’d lost badly the last time they’d fired a missile barrage, and Macros didn’t like to repeat an error twice. They didn’t know how slow and disjointed our command and control was. Macro Command could react quickly, so they tended to assume we could as well.

“We’ll hold our fire then. Good luck down there, Riggs. Kerr out.”

Major Sarin had put up a clock in the table area in front of each of us. The clock read seven minutes. I didn’t want to stare at it, so I tapped the X in the corner and the clock vanished.

I looked up and saw everyone was looking at me. We didn’t have anything to do for four long minutes. I lifted an armored finger and pointed to the line of spread-open suits along the far wall.

“I want you two suited up,” I told the women. “We’re all putting on full gear, helmets too. If they decide to unload on us, it might make the difference.”

I thought for a second Sandra was going to object, but she didn’t in the end. Kwon and I helped the women get into their suits and adjusted their helmets. By the time we were done, the Macros were sliding into low orbit overhead. They had decelerated a great deal. We clanked back to the computer.

“Be careful,” I said, “set the suit gloves to delicate-equipment setting so you don’t smash the tabletop. Remember to set them back if we get into a fight.”

“Who are we going to fight down here?” Sandra asked.

“Macros like landings. There are six invasion ships in the rear of that formation. They aren’t full of tourists. Remember the first time they came to Earth?”

Sandra didn’t ask any more questions about it. We all stared as the last seconds ticked by.

“They are almost in range, sir,” Major Sarin asked. “Any targeting changes?”

“No,” I said. “We’ll stick with the battle plan for now. We’ll put a hundred or so beams on one cruiser at a time until it goes down.”

There had been something of a spirited argument about that. Some of the commanders thought we should focus everything on that big bastard up front and burn it out of the sky. I didn’t like that idea, as I didn’t know how tough it was. If I spent several minutes of battle time shooting at it, even as they were taking my guns out one at a time, they might be able to retreat and keep the ship alive. Then I would be facing all the cruisers without having destroyed anything. On the other hand, I knew how much firepower it took to destroy one of their cruisers, having done so on several occasions in the past. Focusing on the smaller ships, we were guaranteed to destroy one about every ten seconds if we could get all thousand guns over the island on it at once. That would not be possible, however. If they were smart—and Macro Command was fairly smart—they would hang off one coast in a tight line and pound it, staying out of range of our guns on the other side.

Unfortunately, as they approached, I could see this was exactly their plan.

“They are down to a crawl, sir,” Major Sarin said. “They are going to bombard the east coast of the island.”

“That’s why I had you put on these suits,” I said. The clock read eight seconds. “Hang on. This is liable to be quite a ride.”