Conquest

-40-

The second battle for Earth didn’t end the way I’d expected. Barrera made a fine last stand, but that part didn’t really surprise me. He wasn’t exactly a dishonorable man, he was someone who was so dedicated to the cause he’d decided to take matters into his own hands. In some ways, I could understand that. I’d made similar decisions against the U. S. government in the past. I wondered to myself how I would react if I had been playing second banana to someone I disagreed with all these years. Someone like Crow, perhaps. Maybe I would have gotten ideas, over time. After watching my C. O. make mistakes that killed off millions, I could imagine deciding the time had come to act. I might even have become fed up enough to move against my commander.

I hadn’t excused Barrera, but I had allowed him to choose his own form of execution. He died on the walls inside a beam turret that had already been knocked out several times over the preceding days. The nanites had rebuilt it after every assault, because they could repair a turret clamshell much faster than the twisted fleshy part inside. After we’d had to scrape the remains of several marines from the eastern turret, the one that faced the sea and the big bombarding cruisers, we’d abandoned the eastern wall entirely. Manning that wall was quick, messy suicide.

We’d all expected Barrera to be taken out by a cruiser cannon, but it didn’t turn out that way. The enemy fleet in fact did not participate in the last of the battle for Andros Island. Crow had seen to that, along with the brave pilots of nearly two hundred hovertanks and several barrages of ship-killing missiles. Once the enemy dreadnaught broke and ran, the battle went our way. Crow chased the dreadnaught, burning the wounded ship with hundreds of stinging laser cannons. Our Fleet swarmed the mighty vessel, taking out its defensive armament first, then beginning the lengthy process of disemboweling the ship one system at a time. I thought about ordering marines to fly in to attack, but in the end didn’t bother. Why risk losing men in the final blossoming explosion?

Macro Command seemed to realize their control of the skies had been broken. Without the dreadnaught to protect them from our missiles, they were doomed. The last forty-one cruisers nosed upward and their engines flared blue. They left Earth behind. Another salvo of missiles followed the ships, dozens of them closing in from dozens of directions. The missiles never caught up with the ships, but they did give them a nice send-off and prevented them from changing their minds.

Marveling at the number of missiles the militaries of Earth had fired, I had to hand it to Kerr and the rest, they’d distributed what technology they could. Perhaps it had been the example the Chinese set years ago that convinced their governments. They had managed to bring down one of the invaders on that occasion. Since nothing else they could build had ever proven effective, they dumped their budgets into long range ship-killers with low-yield tactical nukes aboard. Preventing the proliferation of nuclear missile technology was no longer an issue amongst the rulers of Old Earth. Survival of the species was all any government cared about now. Lines on maps meant little when entire continents were being off-handedly erased from those same maps by alien invaders. I recalled reading that President Reagan had once said the world would only unite in peace if invaded by aliens. Perhaps, in the end, he had been proven correct.

Back on Andros, our problems weren’t over with. Far from it. The enemy machines, now that their fleet support was gone, had nothing to lose. They rose up en masse, big and small, to storm our battered walls.

There, ready to meet them, sat Lieutenant Colonel Barrera in his clamshell turret. The same turret that had been destroyed three times over the last few days. He fired and fired, quickly killing a dozen of the smaller machines. When a big one finally showed up—an invasion monster severely damaged by my hunter-killer platoons—it came from the sea, dragging two useless legs behind it. Barrera engaged it immediately as it crested above the waves, firing for a third leg. With less than four, it couldn’t hope to get over our walls and thus would be effectively out of the fight. Sensing the danger, the enemy Macro engaged him in return. Hot metal melted on both sides until the clamshell was burnt black, but still Barrera kept pouring laser fire into the enemy’s last vulnerable leg on the left side. The leg went down at last, and the Macro listed to one side, sinking back to the sea with a hissing plume of steam.

Immobile now, but still armed, the big machine relentlessly pounded upon Barrera’s turret until the projector shattered and the turret itself was reduced to glowing slag. My marines glided out into the surf and used a few low-yield grenades to finish the machine, but it had done its work. Barrera had been executed.

The battle raged on for hours, but became one-sided when Crow’s fleet returned and sat above the base, stabbing beams down into the enemy machines. With my marines working grenades and arm-mounted projectors and a hundred ships darkening the skies, the Macros were finally outgunned. Lieutenant Koslov rolled in with the surviving hovertanks, providing us a mobile strong point. In the end, he did a slow rotation around the base, clearing out the last of the struggling enemy.

The death toll was grim on our side as well. We’d lost more than a thousand marines on foot, battle suits or no. Hundreds more had died in turrets, hovertanks and even a few aboard our spacecraft. But for all of that, my weary men gave a ragged cheer when victory was declared. We were exhausted, but successful.

* * *

I woke up hours after the battle had ended. I startled awake, and felt disoriented. In my dreams, fresh assassins stalked me. Silver-eyed men that were half-Macro and half-human. I shook my head, unclamped my helmet and gulped cool air.

I was stretched across three chairs in the mess hall on the third floor of the command bunker. There was wet sand, blood and bits of crumbling nanite metals all over the floor. Many of the wounded had been brought here, as it was relatively safe. Now that the battle was over, they recuperated in the dimly lit chamber, sipping drinks and watching the clean up on the wall-screens.

I turned my head around slowly. It was good to know all these men were loyal. I smiled slightly. That was the best gift Barrera had given me personally. By confessing his guilt and taking the honorable way out, he’d left me assured for now that I wasn’t being hunted—at least not by anything human.

Sandra walked up to me and crouched to kiss me.

“Morning,” I said.

“It’s two a. m.”

“Close enough,” I said, struggling into a sitting position. I groaned as I did so.

Sandra pushed me back down, gently but firmly. I suddenly realized why I was here. I’d been injured in the fighting. I could tell by the burning sensation in my abdomen.

I let her push me down again and forced myself to relax.

“Can you buy me a drink?” I asked.

She put something up to my lips, and I slurped on a straw. I’d been hoping for alcohol, but I was disappointed. It was syrupy and yellow-green, but at least it was ice-cold.

I struggled to get up again. This time, I made it into a sitting position. “Help me get up,” I said.

“No.”

“I’ll just use my suit and fly down there.”

Sandra made a face. She heaved and I was quickly lifted into a standing position. I made my way stiffly down to the command post. Major Sarin was there, looking concerned.

“Sir, you shouldn’t be—” she began.

I waved away her words. “Save it,” I said. “Sandra’s already tried to get me to lie down. I’ve done too much of that already.”

I checked the screens. I didn’t like what I saw. The Macro ships had not retreated to Venus, as I’d hoped. Instead, they were lingering in high orbit, over a hundred thousand miles out. Doubtlessly, they believed Earth’s ship-killer missiles could not reach them there. And they were right. None of the ICBMs I was aware of were capable of reaching escape velocity and leaving Earth’s orbit.

“Where’s Fleet?” I asked.

“Grounded, sir. They are down on Andros with us, effecting repairs.”

I mumbled something about chicken admirals and tried to think. As long as these cruisers were still in the system we weren’t out of danger yet. I shifted my attention to the Tongue of the Ocean, the undersea playground our Macro friends had decided to turn into a breeding ground. I frowned as I saw several green contacts moving around down there.

“What are those?”

“Subs, sir,” Jasmine said. “They’ve been nuking the seabed. They found the enemy factories. Apparently, their domes don’t work properly that far down underwater. U. S. British, French and Russian subs have destroyed their production capacity.”

I made an appreciative, low whistle. “That’s very thoughtful of them. They must have been building up sub support in the area while we fought the Macros. Makes sense. They were effective against the early missile barrage.”

“Either that,” Sandra said, “or they’ve always been out there, lurking around, waiting for a weak moment on our part.”

I looked at her. “Waiting for a good moment to slip onto Andros and grab our factories?”

“Exactly.”

I nodded slowly. I didn’t like her theory, but it was a realistic one. In any case, I was happy to have the help. It was quite a change, not having to do everything to defend Earth. Star Force had needed help this time, and the governments of Earth had backed us up. I wouldn’t forget that. In a way, it healed over some of the wounds from their earlier attempts to take us out of the picture.

I returned my attention to the higher ground. We appeared to be mopping up on Earth, but we did not yet rule the entire Solar System. I stared at the enemy cruisers. They could not be allowed to sit out there, to fester.

“Get Admiral Crow on the line,” I ordered.

Eventually, I got him to answer my calls. He sounded like he’d been sleeping. Somehow, this pissed me off. Sure, it was two a. m., and he’d doubtlessly been awake for many hours. But it seemed wrong that he’d be taking a break now while our home space was still full of enemy ships.

“Crow? Get to your ship, man. Get all your crews to their ships. I’ll be sending along marines to board all of them, too. The freshest men I have.”

“Uh…what are you on about, Riggs?”

“What do you think I’m on about?” I demanded. “We’ve got forty-one Macro cruisers hanging out there, no doubt waiting for reinforcements to come and support them so they can start the next assault. We have the advantage now, and I mean to press it home. We’re flying out there and chasing them out of our system.”

“Don’t you ever take a break, mate?”

“No.”