Conquest

-21-

The bombardment began about a minute after Major Sarin’s clock ran out. That was a good thing, because they’d come in closer than I’d figured they would. That meant my laser turrets along the coastline were well within range.

“Targeting priorities, sir?” Lieutenant Colonel Barrera asked.

“Put a hundred on each cruiser, burn it until it goes down. Automatically retarget next available cruiser.”

“Locked in sir. Are we ready to fire?”

I didn’t answer right away. I wanted the Macros to come in as close as possible, allowing more of my turrets to be in effective range. Slowly, they glided near.

I felt small, rumbling impacts.

“The bombard had begun, sir,” Major Sarin said.

“Any missile launches detected?”

“None, sir. So far, their missile ports are staying closed.”

I grinned inside my helmet. “That’s just how we want it,” I said.

“Are we ready to fire, sir?” Barrera said.

“Hold fire. Let them inch in closer. They don’t like to retreat, and I want as many guns in range as possible. Damage reports, Major Sarin?”

“Two turrets knocked out, one damaged. Update: three knocked out, one damaged.”

“Put some kind of damage meter up for me,” I said.

She deftly tapped at her screen, scripting a tiny app. She was the best at this type of thing.

“The ships appear to be down to a walking pace, sir,” Barrera reported over the strategic command channel.

I thought I heard a tinge of worry in his voice. That was a rare thing, and it meant anyone else would be panicking at this point. I’d been holding back in hopes they would roll right over the center of the island allowing more of our guns to reach them. But if they were going to halt, we were taking hits now for nothing.

“How many guns can we get on them now?”

“About three hundred and sixty effectives, sir,” Sarin said. “That number is dropping….”

“Commence firing. Bring them down!”

On the big screen, hundreds of thin green lines lanced out. They intersected on four points. At the center of each of those points, I knew, was an enemy cruiser under withering fire. If they would have just come in closer and lower, I could be certain of a win. But they were hanging back, wisely feeling their way. They would pound us while standing out over the ocean. From that position, they directed their more heavily armored snouts toward us.

Major Sarin had the counter up by now I glanced at it and my cheek twitched. We’d lost twelve turrets already. We hadn’t taken out a single cruiser yet.

“Barrera,” I shouted, “release the reserves. Send half the hovertanks to the east coast of the island. We need more firepower.”

“Relaying that, sir,” Barrera said. He sounded self-assured again, now that we were firing.

The laser turret count dipped down, they’d destroyed sixteen. Then suddenly, almost at the same moment, three of the enemy cruisers fell from the sky, burning. One exploded in a white flash.

A happy sound swept around the table. “Got a few of them, anyway,” Kwon said expelling his breath as if he’d been holding it since the beginning. Maybe he had been.

I watched as the cruisers halted fully. It would be long minutes before the hovertanks could come out of their bunkers and fly to the east coast. I didn’t like committing reserves so early, but I couldn’t help but worry they’d demolish our defenses on one side of the island, then slowly swing around, cleaning off my ring of defenses. It was all a matter of attrition now, whichever side could take out the other faster would win.

The enemy fire was a shower of orange sparks that came down from each ship in continuous, pulsing streams from nearly a hundred cannons. In return, our fire was represented on the screen as green lances that drew thin lines from a spot on Andros up to the attacking ships. The green lines drew fans from many guns to each cruiser’s belly. As soon as a ship went down, the beams cut out and moments later retargeted another ship and fired again. The cruisers came in a fraction closer, and I saw a new set of beams leap up to greet them. These were from the defensive grid around Fort Pierre itself. The laser turret count leapt upward by forty-one guns.

“They are in our range now,” Sandra said happily.

“Yeah,” Kwon said, “but that means they will begin pounding this base in return.”

As if he were a prophet of doom, the impacts began seconds later. I’d been under fire many times, all of us had. But this was the worst bombardment I’d ever experienced. The walls shook and buckled. The computer table flickered as base power was cut out and the system automatically switched to backup fusion generators located in the bunker itself. I hoped our nanite lines which had dug themselves through the soil to sensor systems on the surface wouldn’t be cut. The sensors themselves were unlikely to be knocked out as they were placed a half-mile out in the empty forest that surrounded the base.

The battle raged on, and I was pretty much helpless to do much about it. The enemy had lost twenty-one cruisers, but our count of active turrets had dropped to about one hundred forty. I calculated our odds, and didn’t like them. They were at eight percent, while we were down to fifty. Once they broke the coastal defenses, they could cruise up or down the beach, outgunning us over every mile of beach. I began to sweat and to wish I’d had the foresight to place a massive central fortification in the middle of the island that could not be out maneuvered. If I’d built longer range lasers in the center, it would be much harder to break Andros. Unfortunately, I’d originally fortified the island with human enemies in mind. Those days seemed very distant now—almost absurd.

The walls shook and buckled. Everyone staggered in their suits.

“A direct hit,” I said. “what’s happening topside, Major Sarin?”

“The headquarters building is gone, sir. We’ll have to dig out after this.”

I nodded. I looked around at the walls, which now bulged in spots. The nanites weren’t able to keep back the pressure from the surrounding earth as it pressed in on our bunker. I turned to Kwon.

“Bring your marines down to this level. We’ll all be safer down here.”

He clanked off and began shouting up the stairs. His platoon hurried down to his call and crowded into the command post around us.

“Just stay back, stay quiet and don’t bump the table, marines,” I told them.

They stood around awkwardly, trying to follow my instructions. When we were down to less than one hundred active guns in range, the Macro fleet began to drift northward. They had seventy of their ships still operating, plus that dreadnaught. That they were moving northward was good news for us personally, as it upped our odds of survival. They were no longer pulverizing our base. But it also meant the enemy knew they were winning and were moving on to the next stage: scraping off our defenses from the entire coastline.

“The hovertanks should be arriving soon, sir,” Barrera reported.

“Glad I can still hear you,” I said. “When they get here, order them to move out over the water and fire up at the southern edge of the Macro line. As they retreat, the tanks will focus all their fire on the hindmost cruiser and bring it down fast. They’ll be tearing us up going north, and we’ll follow along hitting them in the rear.”

I could see the new green contacts zooming over the cross-island highway I’d built a few years back.

“Sir,” Major Sarin said urgently. “General Kerr wants to know if now is the time.”

I thought about it. I could certainly use some help. If NORAD unleashed a barrage of ICBMS, the missiles would be here in about ten minutes. But that would put the U. S., if not all Earth, into this fight again. I didn’t want to commit them unless I had no choice.

“Tell him to standby, we’ve got this.”

My staff exchanged worried glances. I ignored them.

When Barrera’s hovercraft finally got within range of the Macro formation and began taking down one cruiser at a time, the enemy did not react at first. More cruisers went down. With each enemy loss, my staff grew more cheery. When the forty-third cruiser of the battle fell, they shouted in unison. Kwon grew over-excited and slapped the computer table. A long crack ran across it. Ballistic glass or not, he had managed to damage it when the entire Macro fleet had failed.

“Oh…” he said. “Sorry about that, Colonel.”

“First Sergeant, take your men upstairs and begin digging us out of this bunker, please,” I said, trying not to sound pissed-off.

“Yes, sir!” he said. He led his men clanking away and the room felt dramatically less claustrophobic.

It was shortly after that when the Macros finally broke. In a typical fashion, they made the move decisively. They powered up their engines in unison and withdrew, gliding back to the east from which they’d come.

The cheering was deafening now. I peered at the screen, tapping for different views. I stared at data, and something began to worry me. “Barrera, those hovertanks are getting out of position. Call them back to the north shore coverage zone.”

The hovertank pilots, eager to bring down every cruiser they could, were pursuing at high speeds eastward over the ocean. My retrieval command was barely transmitted in time. The Macros paused and turned on their tormenters and unleashed a fury of cannon fire. A cluster of new small contacts appeared.

“Missiles!” I roared, mashing the command override button. I was talking directly to the hovertank commanders and everyone else in Star Force. “Switch all targeting to air-defense. Shoot down those missiles.”

The green beams flickered out on the screen, then restarted. They began stabbing at these new targets. There was only a few seconds to do so. My ground-based laser turrets joined the defense. The missiles, each bearing a Macro technician as pilot, did their best to reach the hovertanks, but they were decimated. When there were only two left, one of them detonated, destroying the other. The shockwave rolled across the glowing blue water and smashed into my hovertanks, flipping them over and turning those that had followed the most eagerly into dead, twisted wreckage.

After the blast, the hovertanks with functional brainboxes slowly picked themselves up and limped back to Andros. I curse and muttered about crazy pilots in my helmet.

“Damage report, Barrera,” I said.

“They knocked out twenty-odd hovertanks. I’m not sure as to the exact numbers, sir. In many cases the pilots were killed but the brainbox is still operating. In some cases, it was the reverse. But there is no doubt they hurt us.”

“They drew us out of our defensive perimeter, just as we did to them. Damn it.”

I sensed a light touch through my armor’s feedback system. Sandra was close to me. “We won, Colonel,” she said.

I rotated my helmet toward her. “Not yet, we haven’t. We’ve repelled an assault, yes. But their fleet is still at least sixty percent effective. They can siege us now if they like and wait for reinforcements to attack again. We need every asset we have.”

She nodded, her face falling. She looked back to the screen. I knew she had only been trying to cheer me up, but I wasn’t in a cheerful mood right now. They’d almost taken us out in one rush. The worst thing was they’d just learned their missiles were still effective. If they used them in the next assault, we would be in bad shape.

Sandra frowned at the screen. “What are they doing now?”

“They’re dropping something, Colonel,” Major Sarin said. “Into the sea.”

I turned back to the screen and peered at it. I opened my gloves to handle the screen more gently and ran my fingertips over the cracked glass. There they were, about twenty miles offshore, dropping huge objects into the water. The ocean fountained with each splashing impact. It looked as if their ships were laying eggs of some kind.

“Which ships are those?” I demanded. “Barrera, which ships are dropping objects into the water? Are they dropping bombs on the U. S. subs out there?”

“I don’t think so, sir,” Barrera replied. His voice scratched for a moment as the connection fuzzed, then came back. “The ships making the drop have been identified, sir. They’re invasion ships, Colonel. All six have dropped a large object in that area.”

“That’s the trench,” I said.

The region was known as the Tongue of the Ocean, a deep gash in the sea that separated Andros from New Providence. The hundred mile long region reached depths of six thousand feet.

“What the hell are they dropping?” Major Sarin said.

“Macros,” I said.

“Invasion forces?”

It looked all too familiar. I recalled the first Macro ship that had made it past our little Nano ships years ago. They had dropped payloads on Argentina. In the end, they had destroyed an entire continent.

“Yes,” I said, staring.

“I didn’t know they could operate on the sea bottom,” Sandra said.

“Neither did I.”