Conquest

-25-

We reached Battalion Ten’s designated gathering spot before Captain Sloan’s team did. We glided swiftly to the area, but everyone along the line slowed down warily as we drew near.

Something was desperately wrong. Instead of a flat area of seabed before us, a great hole presented itself. It was hard to tell at first what we were looking at. It resembled a cliff edge, similar to the one we’d dropped down to get here. The rim was ragged, as if it had broken away recently. Exposed sediment was darker than the bottom we’d been passing over, which consisted of sand intermixed with tumbled stones. When we reached the edge, I ordered a halt and everyone obeyed.

I gazed in both directions, seeing my men line up. Their suit lights could be identified at a hundred yards or more in the cloudy water. I could tell they formed a crescent.

“It’s a pit,” I said. “Kwon?”

“Right here, sir.”

“Send a squad in each direction. Tell them to try to follow the edge of this formation all the way around. If they run into each other on the far side, they are to return. If they keep going for more than five minutes without finding anything, tell them to do an about-face and come back anyway.”

Kwon found two non-coms in green-lit suits and sent them off to follow my orders. I waved the corporal with the communications unit forward and tried to contact Captain Sloan. He should be arriving very soon.

Before I could get the hydrophone working, Sloan arrived. He sailed along, looking for blue-lit officers until he found me. It was a relief to be able to communicate clearly with radio.

“What the hell is this, Colonel?” Sloan asked me as soon as he was in range.

“A big hole.”

“Pardon me, but that’s not helpful.”

“Yeah, I think it didn’t help Battalion Ten, either.”

“You think they glided right off this cliff? Five hundred men?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think the cliff was here when they arrived. This is the gathering spot they had staked out. They showed up on station, waited for orders, but something hit them before our transmission came in.”

Sloan was quiet for a moment. “Something that big? So soon?”

“I don’t think it was some kind of super-Macro. I think it was an explosion. The concussion could have knocked out their suit systems. Either that, or it was a whole lot of little Macros under the surface.”

“What are we going to do about it, sir?”

It was my turn to hesitate. There was a big part of me that wanted to head over to that cave the majority of my force was assaulting. But I didn’t like leaving marines behind without investigating. I also didn’t like massing all my marines in a single spot on the ocean floor. Mostly, I wanted to know what had hit my men at this spot.

Before I’d made any kind of decision, the squads I’d sent off to circumnavigate the pit returned. They’d met up on the far side, as I had suspected they would. The hole was circular, and roughly a mile in diameter.

“We’re going down,” I told Sloan. “One company at a time. If a unit lives long enough to signal back the all-clear, the next company will step off this cliff.”

“But sir—”

“Don’t freak out, Sloan,” I said. “I’ll lead the first unit. You can wait up here. We’ll step off the edge in one minute.”

“I don’t know what you are trying in imply,” Sloan said. He sounded hurt.

Too bad, I thought. “You are a survivor, Sloan,” I told him. “That’s not the same as a coward. It’s not a bad thing.”

“Well, sir,” Captain Sloan said. “I’d like the honor of leading the first team down.”

I was surprised, but decided if he wanted to do it, he could have the job. I watched him line his men along the edge. A hundred of Star Force’s finest. When they jumped, a small part of me knew that if they all died, I was going to feel badly. But I had to find out what was going on. If the Macros had somehow slaughtered five hundred of my men at the bottom of the sea, I wanted to at least know how they had done it.

I had a sudden thought as I watched Sloan marshal his marines. “Captain,” I said over the command channel.

“Colonel?”

“Send them down one squad at a time. Weapons out.”

He liked the idea and gave the orders. The first squad took the leap, then the second. Sloan stepped out with the third squad. I saw his blue suit among the numerous red-lit ones. I was able to pick him out for a long time as he fell deeper.

More squads went, but when the last ones were stepping off, there was a sudden commotion. A rush of bubbles came up from the hole. Then more bubbles. They were silver and there were way too many of them. Far from thinking them lovely, I saw those bubbles and knew his men were in trouble. The only way these suits should be able to release bubbles was when they ruptured.

I heard calls up the line, from suit-to-suit, man-to-man. They were passing up a message. When it got back up to us, it was a scream.

“Too deep! Release your pods!”

Every man had an emergency bubble to take them upward. Unfortunately, they found out that they didn’t really work once you went down more than six thousand feet. They hadn’t been designed for that depth. When the gas canister fired to fill the plastic bladder, it popped in most cases. A few men shot upward, dragged toward the distance surface by one wrist. When they passed us, they cut themselves free and glided to the rim of the hole.

Others came back up using their suit’s repellers. It wasn’t as fast, but it was more controlled. I counted the men as they came back up. We’d sent down about seventy, and we’d lost most of them.

I gazed down into the hole, frowning fiercely. Kwon came up beside me. He was unmistakable in his green-lit, oversized suit.

“Colonel Riggs?” he asked. “What happened?”

“The suits can’t go down that far,” I said. “They imploded. Like a sub that sinks to the bottom. Their suits ruptured and the nanites couldn’t keep up. In short, they died.”

“But how did this hole get here?”

“I suspect the Macros did it. They set off a big charge here under our marines. Maybe there was an underground chamber beneath the gathering spot for Battalion Ten. In any case, I think they collapsed the seabed, and the marines fell. They could have used their flight systems to get out of the trap, but I’m guessing their commander ordered them to take the drop, to see what was at the bottom. He must not have realized their suits would pop when they went too deep.”

“But the lead men should have seen what was happening and flown out the way Sloan’s men did.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe they all went down at more or less the same time and hit the kill zone together.”

“Hey sir,” Kwon said, pointing down over the rim. “Who’s that?”

I looked down. I smiled slowly. A blue-lit suit was rising up toward us. I didn’t know how he’d lived, but I knew who it had to be.

“That, my good man, is the unkillable Captain Sloan.”

All along the line of leaning marines a cry went up as he kept coming. Every second he came slowly, but doggedly, closer.

“Maybe his suit is damaged,” Kwon said. “One repeller might be out.”

“Hey Sloan,” I shouted. “Good to see you slip out of that one. I lost a bet with Kwon, because of you.”

“You did?” Kwon asked, bewildered. He pointed downward again. “What’s that thing?”

No one answered him, because we could all see it now. Sloan didn’t have a problem with his suit—not exactly. He had all his repellers going full blast and had his gas-bubble out too. Unfortunately, he also had the upper half of a Macro latched onto his foot.

We aimed and lit up the tenacious monster. A mass of steam-bubbles rolled upward from every gun, and the robot was torn apart. Moments later, Captain Sloan drifted over to me and I took his hand and hauled him up over the rim.

“That was close,” he said.

I nodded, impressed. “Closer than usual, even for you.”

Kwon knelt and busied himself removing the last clamped-on Macro arm that dangled from Sloan’s left leg.

“Did you build the officer’s suits to the same specs, Colonel?”

I opened my mouth to say yes, but hesitated. I recalled leaving Sandra in charge of the duplication process. Could she have tampered with the design? Could she have altered it to keep me safe, knowing I would wear one of the officer’s suits?

“I thought I did,” I said.

“Well, everyone else’s seemed to collapse when we got to certain depth,” Sloan reported. “We got down there, and we could see bubbles coming up from the first squads. But I figured they were in trouble and ordered weapons at the ready. It was hard to see, sir.”

“Go on.”

“We were all expecting enemy at the bottom, and figured maybe they’d already gotten their first kills. But it wasn’t like that. All of a sudden, the men around me were popping—shooting out bubbles and going radio silent. It took me a second to realize what was happening. I radioed back up, but you know how short our range is down here.”

“How’d you get that lobster on your foot?” I asked.

“We’d about reached the bottom. The men who were still alive were being taken out. There were more marines down there already, sir. I must have seen fifty battle suits. It had to be Battalion Ten. The ones that survived the pressure died from a Macro ambush at the bottom.”

I grunted. He sounded shook-up. I ordered a head count. He’d lost about forty more. In retrospect, it had been stupid to send the whole company down. But in these situations, it was so hard to tell what the right move was. If I’d ordered down a squad and they’d dropped into a mass of Macros, we would have lost them all and learned nothing. By going down in strength, I’d thought I was offering my men protection. Unfortunately, the real enemy in this battle had been the depth of the ocean, and it had won the day.

“What are we going to do about the Macros down there?” Kwon asked me.

“Get out the grenades,” I said.

We stood a man at three points around the rim with a small-yield tactical nuclear grenade. We set them for contact-detonation, and tossed them in. Then—we ran for it.

The shockwave rolled up from behind to smacked my marines in the ass. It sent us tumbling out of control through the water. I felt as if I’d been hit by a train. Fortunately, I’d ordered my troops to glide upward so only a few were smashed into the rocky seabed. After another headcount, we found we’d lost only two more men, both of them were men who’d jumped into the hole on Sloan’s ill-fated adventure. I figured their suits had been damaged and couldn’t handle the shockwave from the explosion, even though we should have reached a safe distance by then.

I reported my situation to the other battalions via the hydrophone. They were assaulting the cave entrance while we spent our time jumping in holes.

Things had gone badly on their front—worse than they had for my two battalions. The enemy had suckered them into narrow tunnels and ambushed my men. Outside on the open seafloor we had the advantage due to our superior numbers and firepower. Every macro that showed its nose outside the tunnels was burned by a hundred guns. But once we went into their warren of tunnels, we lost that advantage. There had been savage fighting down there, and we’d lost more men than they had lost machines.

When I arrived and saw the scene, I began kicking the butt of every officer I saw. But it didn’t change the facts. These Macros weren’t going to be driven out of their holes without a determined assault. I was certain the factories must be down there, so I prepared to do the impossible. I reorganized my marines into independent platoons. That was as big of a unit as could operate effectively in the tunnels. A platoon could all stay within radio distance of one another. A company could not when stretched out down the length of a tunnel.

I felt good about the situation. This next was strong and deeply dug-in, but it had to be protecting their factories. We’d scoured much of the seabed and this was the most strongly protected point.

I was about to order the final assault, expecting grim losses in trade for victory, when the oceans above darkened and very bad things began to come down toward us.