Conquest

-26-

The Macros had called for air support. I can’t say that I blamed them. They were in trouble. Every beachhead is at its weakest when it first hits enemy territory. Part of my basic plan had been to attack them before they could get organized, before their numbers could grow. With luck, I’d figured they would not be able to defend themselves.

We hadn’t had that kind of luck, but we’d done them a lot of damage. The fighting was hard, but at that moment, I figured we were clearly on the winning team. Unfortunately, the Macros realized this before we could wipe out their main nest.

Everything changed when several wedge-shaped vessels the size of buildings dove into the oceans with us and glided through the water toward my massed formations. We were all in one place now—maybe that was what they’d been waiting for. They came down and came in close to fire their big belly turrets at us at point-blank range.

A spaceship really isn’t all that different from a submarine in design. Both have to be self-contained and airtight. Both are designed to withstand extreme environments. I’d never seen the Macros fly a cruiser down into the oceans, but I’d never seen anything indicating they couldn’t do it.

The second I realized what was coming for us, I ordered my men to scatter. My first thought was to swarm the cruisers one at a time and use our grenades to take them out. Maybe, I thought, this was an opportunity to take the enemy fleet out, to deal a devastating blow.

But then more of them kept diving down after us like greedy seabirds finding a nest teaming with thousands of hatchling turtles. I gave a general bug-out order to every commander and pulled my own rip-cord. With repellers on full and my gasbag dragging me up by the wrist, I shot up past the shark-like cruisers that swam near. Once we were above them, we were safe from their belly-turrets. The escaping last men dropped a barrage of grenades down like depth charges, but we couldn’t see if they did much damage in the inky dark water below.

Once we broke the surface, we flew for the beaches at top speed. We had to get under the Andros Island’s defensive umbrella as soon as possible. The cruisers didn’t dare follow us to the surface and gun us down. They’d taken enough loss against Andros Island’s stinging lasers. Over the intervening days, we’d rebuilt a large number of them, and we’d stationed most of the hovertanks on the beach as well to patch the gap in the island’s defenses and to cover any retreat from the sea.

My marines reached the beaches with their tails between their legs, but most of us had lived to fight another day. I walked the shoreline, counting dead, wounded and missing. We were still eight-five percent effective. I wasn’t sure exactly how much damage we’d done the enemy with our campaign, but I was fairly certain we couldn’t knock them off the planet like that—not as long as they still rule the skies with their fleet.

Decompression sickness was a major issue for hundreds of my men. Our suits had the ability to function as mini-decompression systems, maintaining stable pressure inside. They operated the way a submarine allowed her crew to go up and down in the water without building up nitrogen in every man’s blood. Unfortunately, a number of the suits had ruptured due to our speedy exit from the sea. We’d been down too deep and there were limits to what nanites could do and how fast they could do it.

Getting an idea, I decided to find out if those new-age pressure-chamber devices were still on the island. Ping, the purchasing agent in charge, had recently died. Unsurprisingly, she had never filled out the paperwork to return the machines. We broke them out of a surviving warehouse south of the main base and used our suit generators with gleaming lines of nanites to supply the required power. We had to be careful not to step on the nanites, as they were alive with voltage—essentially, they were bare wires. We ran the machines and they did their job. We set up an odd sort of triage in the middle of burnt trees and scorched sands, and it helped my marines. I thought I would have to praise Crow for accidentally having bought something useful.

I looked around me, and I took another kind of accounting. Most of my men had removed their helmets, allowing me to see their faces. Their expressions were grim. No one likes losing. Contrary to the popular adage, a loss does not make you stronger for the next fight, it makes you weaker. Morale is a critical factor in any fight for a human force. As a species, we can be talked into self-sacrifice, but we don’t want to risk our lives when we believe it’s all for nothing.

I looked out to the sea, where there were still floating bodies marked with puddles of bright dye. We’d sent our dead up to the world of sunlight that way, but now that we’d been chased out of ocean, it simply looked gruesome. No one had gotten to the dead yet, there were too many wounded and suffering from decompression sickness for them to be gathered any time soon.

The demoralization of my men got to me as I walked among them. I wondered how many of my men had quietly considered another obvious option: we could throw down our arms and abandon Andros. If we simply evacuated the island, the Macros might well march over it, find nothing of interest and declare themselves winners. Every human in Star Force could live on the rest of the planet. None of us had to again face the horrors that now brewed beneath the waves or above the clouds. Some of my men must have thought of this, and I knew the thought would turn into words in time, and then it would spread and invade the mind of every marine. Why fight if we could not win? Why not retreat, build-up and wait until the Macros grew tired of circling our world and went to pester some other trouble-spot in their empire?

I might have fallen prey to this kind of thinking if I’d not seen the Eden system myself. I imagined now that the herd peoples we called Centaurs had at some point been faced with a similar choice. Since the surface of their worlds were overrun by Macros, I had to assume they had negotiated to survive on their satellite habitats. The Macros had encircled them, just as they did to us now. But the machines hadn’t left. The enemy hadn’t forgotten the Centaurs. They were patient beyond measure. What meaning did passing years have for a race of machines? They bided their time, and had already made attempts to bypass their arrangements with the defeated herds. They had used us for precisely such a purpose.

I could well imagine Earth enduring a similar fate, with the Macros bringing a third party of killers to root us out once and for all. They would never forget us. They would never retreat. They would never leave us alone.

My ruminations led me to an inescapable conclusion: we had to fight this battle, and we had to win it somehow. My men required a morale boost in order to stay effective. I thought for a minute or two, and came up with a plan to keep their minds in this fight. Something to give them hope. We would busy ourselves with fortifications. We would prepare for the inevitable Macro assault we all knew was coming with a fresh set of defenses.

A few hours later, I had my entire force off the beach and back inside the burnt-out husk that was our base. The clean up and rebuilding had begun here, mostly evidenced by tireless crawlers and fit marines who stacked debris into earthen mounds. It was often easier, given Nano technology, to shove aside the old and rebuild fresh structures. Corrugated steel and concrete was outdated and had been surpassed by newer construction materials.

To start with, I dumped out a foot-thick bead of constructive nanites just beyond where the old concrete wall had stood. For years now, whenever our Nano factories had an idle moment, they’d been instructed to produce constructive nanites. We had thousands of tons of them stashed around the islands. Now was the time, I calculated, to make use of this resource.

The nanite lines, without orders, looked like mounds of metallic sand granules. They shone almost like liquid mercury in the sun, but were more textured than mercury. Too small for the human eye to pick out individuals in the mix, it looked like a single mass of gelatinous metal. Adding to the eerie look of them, the nanite mounds tended to move of their own accord, shivering, bubbling and slowly stirring in circular eddies. I could not recall ever having seen so many nanites massed in a single place as I did today.

When the entirety of Fort Pierre was encircled with the silver snake of nanites, I knew I had shifted the conversation among my men. They stared in fascination, wondering and speculating what I had in mind. What new trick was the conjurer about to perform?

I avoided looking at them. I stayed intently focused on my efforts. But secretly, I allowed myself a grin in the dark interior of my helmet. I had piqued their interest. Now was the time to move things forward.

I instructed the entire nanite mass to put up a thin outer wall of metal. I sent crawlers forward with pallets of metals for the nanites to chew up and spit out. We served up thousands chunks of raw steel, aluminum, tin and copper. The nanites dug into the metals like a hot meal and soon the walls were rising, blotting out the picturesque view of the beach. I knew Sandra would complain about that part, but this was a military operation and we were at war. Defense had to come first.

When the outer wall was a good thirty feet high, it was a yellowy color due to the mixing alloys. I knew the nanites were part of the mix as well, so the wall would be self-repairing if the enemy should blow a hole in it. The structure was tall, but only about two inches thick.

Barrera was the first one to approach me as I worked on the walls. Kwon tagged along with him.

“Colonel?” Barrera asked.

“What is it?”

“Um, I can see you are busy sir. Maybe I should talk to you after you are…uh, done with this thing.”

“Thing?” I asked, finally turning to look at him. “What does it look like to you, Barrera?”

“A wall sir.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing, sir,” he said.

I stared at him, knowing he had more to say. Barrera looked at the thin walls doubtfully. At his side, Kwon shuffled from foot to foot slowly. I waited for them to speak.

“It’s just that—well, this is a very thin wall, Colonel,” Barrera said at last.

“Ah,” I said, “so that’s it. Well, tell the men I’m not done yet.”

“Okay, sir,” Barrera said. He turned around sharply and left me to my work. Kwon stumped off after him. Both men were frowning.

I chuckled and decided it was time to call in the crawlers again. All the while I’d been building this thin, high wall the crawlers had been following their standard programming to mound up the smashed rubble into mini-mountains. Like tall, ugly anthills, slag-heaps were everywhere around the base.

I ordered the crawlers to turn their blades in a new direction. They were to push the mounds of earth and debris to the perimeter, mounding it up against the outer metal wall I’d put up.

Once I had the machines working to my satisfaction, I called up Barrera and ordered him to put the marines on shovel duty. It’s hard to think about desertion and hopelessness while you’re shoveling your ass off, especially if you’re building something interesting and impressive. After another hour of work, the new walls were really taking shape. Looking at the wall, none of the men could doubt them now. The outer surface was inches thick of bright, reactive metal. Behind that was a mound of rubble ten feet thick at the top and forty feet thick at the bottom.

I walked the perimeter, making sure the walls stood a uniform forty feet in height. I had fresh barrels of nanites dumped over the mounds of rubble next. They covered the interior with a glaring metal skin of nanites and loose metals leeched from the debris. I nodded to myself appreciatively. The structure would serve fairly well as a defensive fortification against a ground attack.

The outside face of the walls was straight and sheer. The inside was slanted, as it was really metal covering mounds of dirt and trash. I began putting up the finishing touches, adding stairways and ramps to the top, and a crenulated line of battlements all along the parapet. I had marines set up heavy gun emplacements with clamshell turrets here and there then added automated lasers in-between all along the top of the wall.

As darkness fell, I burned massive arrays of lamps and kept the men working in shifts, allowing the exhausted to shower and rest. Barrera approached me at around midnight.

“Hello Colonel,” he said, his mood was obviously brighter—but it was always hard to tell with Barrera.

“Hello,” I grunted. My mood was beginning to sour as fatigue set in. Even with nanotized bodies, we all grew tired and needed to rest eventually.

“This is very impressive, sir.”

“Glad you approve.”

Barrera looked at me. “I never said I disapproved, sir.”

“Oh come on,” I said. “Admit it man, you thought I’d lost it when I first started building this thing.”

Barrera gave me a ghostly smile. A rare expression for him. “Well, I’m more at ease now. I’ve got just three things I wish to ask you about.”

“Name them.”

“First, what if they come from above? Will this wall help against their fleet?”

“No, not really. But they aren’t massing on the bottom of our oceans for a science experiment. They will come up and assault these walls, I’m sure of that.”

“Very good sir. On to my second point: What if they come from below?”

I paused. He had me there. They were diggers, these mechanical monsters. I’d fought drilling Macros before in South America and they were clearly active under the sea.

“You make a good point there. I’ll have to build underground defensive layers as we did on Helios against the Worms.”

Barrera nodded. “Excellent idea, sir.”

“And the third thing?”

He looked at me appraisingly. “When’s the last time you had some sleep, sir?”

I felt a surge of irritation. I felt like slapping him just for saying the word sleep. But then, I realized I was exhausted. I’d fought a hard underwater campaign, then exited the sea just in time to begin a massive rebuilding effort. I sat down on the tracks of a deactivated crawler.

“Just sitting down feels good,” I said. “You’re right, Lieutenant-Colonel. Can you carry on while I get some rest?”

“It’s as if you read my mind, sir.”

I was too tired to laugh or even smile at him. I did shake his hand, however, and headed toward the sleeping tents we’d set up in the landing pits. A sound made by moving fabric caused me to stop and look behind me. There, in the blackness, I saw a familiar outline. It was Sandra. She was particularly disturbing at night, as she no longer seemed to require light to see by. I wondered if her eyes had been rebuilt with the ability to see in the infrared spectrum. I suspected that was the case, but I’d never asked her about it. We rarely talked about our special abilities—at least, not the freaky ones. It was a turn-off to notice how much our bodies had changed over time. We just went with it, and by silent mutual agreement, pretended we were the same normal human couple from years past.

“Did you put Barrera up to that?” I asked.

“He handled it well, didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He did. He’s more diplomatic than you are.”

“More than either of us.”

I nodded in agreement and fell onto a cot. Sandra fell into bed beside me. I wondered if she had been following me ever since I’d stepped out of the sea. I figured she probably had. I’d half-expected to run into her while underwater.