Conquest

-36-

I struggled to my feet, screaming “KWON!” in my helmet. I knew I was screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything except a loud ringing sound. I kept at it anyway. “KWON!”

I checked Sandra first. She was squirming, which had to be a good sign. I tried to help her to her feet, but she slapped me away, wanting to stay down. I let her. I wasn’t sure how hurt she was, but if she wanted to stay lying there, she could.

I staggered in a circle. Ash was up to my ankles. Most of the trees nearby were down, and most of the trunks were on fire. I walked around in a world of white smoke and debris. Dead men were scattered here and there. The next time I shouted, “KWON!” I could hear my own voice.

Apparently, the First Sergeant could too. He stumped up, dragging an ankle that was obviously broken. It twisted away from his body at an odd angle, doubtlessly held in place by the stiffness of his boot.

“What is it, Colonel?” Kwon asked.

“What is it?” I echoed his words in disbelief. “Look around us, what do you think I’m upset about?”

“Yes, sir. I see causalities, sir.”

“Causalities, right. Did something go wrong, here?”

“The blast was too big, sir.”

I clapped him on the shoulder with a gloved hand. The sound of metal on metal clanked and rasped.

“Exactly, First Sergeant,” I said. “You did it again, didn’t you?”

“Sir?”

“You left the grenades on default. I specifically instructed you to set the devices to their lowest yield setting.”

“No, sir,” Kwon said.

“No?”

“I did not, sir. I set them for low yield. I double-checked, sir.”

I stared at Kwon for a second. “You’re sure?”

“Absolutely, sir. After that time we nearly died on the Macro cruiser, I always double-check settings.”

I didn’t know what to make of it. I tried to clear my thoughts, but it was difficult under the circumstances.

“Okay,” I said, “we’ll figure out what went wrong later. Get all the men together. Gather the wounded and the dead too, even if we have to drag them out of here. Let’s move to a safe position.”

We ended up using fallen saplings covered in charcoal as stretchers. We dragged, limped and drifted out of the forest. I was thinking hard as we retreated. The blast had been much too big. Instead of less than a kiloton, I estimated the yield at closer to ten times what it was supposed to be. Possibly even Hiroshima-level. The enemy had been decimated, but so had we. I could only hope there hadn’t been any other teams operating in the forest near us at the time. If another platoon had been caught even closer to the blast, they had probably been wiped out.

How could it have happened? Only three possibilities came to mind. Either Kwon was an idiot and had set the yield to high by accident—a possibility I was willing to entertain—or a device had malfunctioned. The third possible scenario was the one that concerned me the most, however. What if it had been sabotage? What if the devices had been tampered with, either after Kwon had set them or before we’d come out here? That was the thought that would not leave my mind, and it haunted me as we escaped the burning trees.

When we got to the open zone around Fort Pierre, we came up behind thousands of smaller Macros attacking the walls. The free-fire zone around the fort had long ago been cleared of trees to create a field without cover for enemy attackers. There were so many beam flashes going off our autoshades dimmed to near blackout. It seemed like every marine we had was up on that wall, blazing away with both his arm-mounted projectors. Larger cannons were mounted at the corners as well, and they fired in pulsing sprays of light. With so many beam projectors flashing, our autoshades made it difficult to see. The sunlight overhead was too dim to penetrate the gloom of our helmets. It was like witnessing combat in a room full of strobe lights.

“Switch helmets to wireframe perception mode,” I ordered.

One of the newest improvements I’d made to our equipment load-out was a new sensory system for the HUD. Instead of using direct visual input, a brainbox interrupted the signal and transformed the data from pickups into a three-D environment. Enemies were red wireframes, while friendlies were limed in green. Neutral equipment and unknowns appeared as blue or yellow, respectively. The system took a little getting used to, but it was a lot better than getting a headache from constantly shifting brightness levels. Before, intense firefights had often resembled wild lightning storms from the point of view of a marine in the middle of it.

We formed up at the tree line and shot a few lingering Macros in the back. They were mostly focused on attacking our walls. I didn’t call for an open assault yet, however. There were just too few of us and too many of the enemy. Kwon counted less than twenty effectives left in our unit.

“Do we attack, sir?” Kwon asked me doubtfully.

Captain Sloan came up beside us and threw himself down. We were all lying in the dirt behind the enemy lines. “Suicide, sir.”

“I agree,” I said. I wanted to get into the fort, but I didn’t want to die right off. “If we hit them enough to make them turn on us. They’ll do it with overwhelming force and annihilate us, or at least chase us off.”

“Do you think they know we are here, sir?”

“Oh, hell yeah,” I said. “They’ve got cameras at both ends, same as we do. They knew even before we smoked their snipers back here.”

“In that case, why did we get this close?” Sandra asked from above me.

I looked up and saw her form crouching in a mangrove tree. I was amused to see the HUD system had her marked down as yellow—the brainbox was not completely sure if she was friend or foe.

“Because I understand Macro Command,” I said. “They like to do things in an all-or-nothing fashion. Pecking at them lightly isn’t enough to make them break their plans and turn on us. But if we push things, they will.”

“So,” Sloan added, “we’re safe as long as we don’t hit them hard.”

I glanced at him in irritation. “We are marines. We’re not here to be safe.”

“I just meant—”

“Excuse me, Colonel,” Kwon interrupted. “Could we try to fly right over them?”

“If we all want to die,” Sandra said unhelpfully.

“I’m not sure,” I said, “but I think that is pushing their decision to ignore us too far, First Sergeant. Right now, they are going all-out to breach the fort walls. But if we look like we are joining the defenders, we’ll almost certainly come under fire.”

No one had a snappy comeback for that statement. For a few moments, we watched the battle rage. Men on the walls fired with discipline, popping up for a moment, beaming down on a single machine for a fraction of a second and usually disabling it. A dozen Macros were left kicking and thrashing in the dirt all along the bottom of the wall. Frequently, small EMP grenades and explosives were tossed down into the throng as well. Every time one of my men showed himself, however, he instantly came under heavy fire. A dozen beams slashed this armor. Each marine hit in such a fashion invariably was crisscrossed with glowing burns and shrouded in smoke from the vaporized metals. Usually, the men survived due to the effectiveness of the new armor. I knew they were under orders to fire, then quickly duck back down behind the scarred walls. When they were behind cover, another marine on repair-duty would spray fresh constructives over the damaged area, effectively filling in the burning holes in the damaged helmet and breastplate.

Things didn’t always work out the way they were supposed to, however. As I watched, men were occasionally caught by too many enemy beams at once. Sometimes, this was their own fault as they kept their fire going for too long before ducking back behind cover. I understood the temptation. If you exposed yourself for half a second, you might not seriously damage your target. If you dared to go longer—more than a full second—you were much more likely to kill a machine outright, but you might be taken out in return.

“We can’t just sit here, Colonel,” Kwon said. “We have to get into this fight somehow.”

I didn’t answer right away. I felt the same emotions he did. Watching fellow marines struggle just a few hundred yards away while sitting idle was torment. Fortunately, a solution pushed up through the trees behind us less than a minute later.

I figured the machine had been hit by our blast, or a blast from one of the other platoons on hunter-killer duty. One side of it was scorched black and dented in spots. The gigantic machine was damaged and missing one of its thick walking legs, but it was still able to move faster than a man could run. It shouldered its way among the trees and loomed over us. The tree Sandra was in went over and down with a resounding crash. I saw her spring out of it to safety, like a cat leaping from danger.

My men engaged it without orders, which was fine with me. Being well-trained and somewhat experienced in dealing with the big machines, they tripled up on each of the flashing anti-personnel turrets that sprayed us with raking fire. My men in their new battle suits had several advantages over previous marine units that had met such enemies. We had approximately double the firepower, greater mobility and superior armor. Still, we were taking casualties. Within thirty seconds, we’d taken out six of the sixteen turrets but were down to seventeen effectives. I gritted my teeth as the enemy beam turrets focused in on our dead and wounded and hosed them with merciless fire. Incapacitated men were burned to slag. The Macros hadn’t updated their software much in the area of identifying active threats versus disabled ones. They liked to be sure.

There was one more critical power our troops now had that they’d never been able to employ before. I decided to use it now.

“Fly up,” I shouted on the unit override. “Get up on top of this tin can. We’ll knock out its big gun, and it won’t be able to touch us.”

The men liked my idea. They lifted off in every direction. Sandra couldn’t fly, but she was still one of the first ones to reach the top. Using her two knives like a pair of mountain-climbers ice-axes, she sprang up the nearest massive leg. She was up to the top faster than one of the local monkeys could reach the top of a palm tree.

Up top, the enemy had two weapons systems to deal with. There was a heavy beam projector and a flechette-style anti-air battery. Neither was effective against a team of armored infantry at very close range. We disabled the systems and the Macro couldn’t touch us.

“That was great, Colonel,” Kwon said, breathing hard. He clanked up to me, his boots heavily stomping on the metal skin of the Macro’s back. He’d turned on his magnetics to keep a firm footing. I ordered the rest of the men to do the same.

“What are we going to do now?” Kwon asked me.

“Just wait a second. We’ll see if this Macro figures it out.”

“Figures out what?”

I didn’t have to answer him. The monster proceeded to do exactly what I’d hoped it would. Calculating that it could not effectively remove us, it decided to ignore us and moved on to the next target of opportunity. It strode toward the walls of Fort Pierre and stepped right over them. There, it could use its belly-turrets on a target-rich environment.

“What now, sir?” shouted Captain Sloan.

“The free ride is over,” I told him. “Now, we kill it.”

I threw myself over the side and glided down to join the base defenders. In a massive blaze of firepower, we tore the huge machine apart.