Extinction

-43-

Klaxons sounded. I ordered all my marines to prepare for ground assault. I ordered the crashstraps to resecure everyone in the command brick who’d escaped them over the last few hours. Outside our brick, hundreds of marines loaded into hovertanks near the big rear doors. They would be our first wave, rushing out when the doors opened. We had no idea how hot the landing zone would be. We hoped we’d be granted a safe LZ, but who knew how the Macros thought these things should go? The tanks would sweep the area, supported by infantry. Once they had given the all-clear, we would begin unloading the bricks.

I looked at my com-link thoughtfully. I hadn’t spoken to the Macros since I’d placed the passive sensor array and fried one of their test subjects. I’d not wanted to push my luck. But specific information on our mission goals was required now.

“Command module,” I said aloud, “open channel with Macro Command.”

There was a delay. It was longer than usual. Maybe the Macros were preoccupied with the landing. Or maybe the original Macro commander had been blown away by an enemy mine and now I was being rerouted to the backup.

“Channel open,” said the command module at last.

“Translate and relay: I am Kyle Riggs, Star Force Marine Commander. I need to know our mission goals.”

“Incoming Message: Destroy resisting indigenous biotics.”

I sighed. Were we supposed to kill every bug we found on the planet? “Give us the coordinates of the enemy’s most vital area.”

A series of numbers came back. I waved my hand at Captain Sarin and our useless navigator. They worked quickly on the big board and pinpointed the spot. I was alarmed when I saw the goal coordinates.

“We have to get to the top of that eighty thousand foot peak?” I asked.

“No sir,” said the navigator, working his fingers on the screen. The image quickly shifted to a side view. “The actual location is underneath the big mountain, at about sea-level. It’s miles deep inside the mountain itself.”

“Great,” I said, getting the picture. We were going to have to dig them out. Suddenly, I understood why the Macros had brought us here. Their big machines weren’t capable of going down narrow tunnels. Maybe the enemy were strong enough to fight off their smaller, worker-class machines.

“I get it,” I said. “They can’t get into the tunnels. So, it’s time to send in the marines.”

I felt everyone staring at me. I ignored them. “Command module, relay this: If we reach this goal spot and destroy all resistance, will we have completed our mission on this world?”

The answer came swiftly this time. “Incoming Message: Send transmission when goal reached.”

I disconnected with Macro Command. I soon felt gravity again. We were coming down into the atmosphere. “This is to be an underground campaign. Regear all our troops accordingly. Order supply to prep scripts for extra lighting, climbing equipment, suit-tethers and the like. We put this option on the menu, I remember the meetings.”

Major Robinson worked his screen quickly. “It wasn’t one of our top possibilities. But we can do it.”

“Not even one of the top five maybes? We know this is a job the Macros wanted us for, specifically. We saw the enemy images a long time ago. They are stretched-out bugs. No one thought of tunnels?”

I looked around at my staff. They shrugged and pecked at their screens. I felt a shouting outburst coming up from my lungs, but I fought to hold it back. I forced myself to remember how green we all were. We had the finest tech humanity had ever wielded in a single force. But we had never done this before. This was our first invasion of an alien world. Theory was meeting up with reality, and there were bound to be mistakes.

“It’s okay,” I said, forcing down the tirade that bubbled within me. “We’ll get through it. We’ll learn from this. Now, give me a force-list run-down. Give me the bad news first. Let’s recalculate our effectiveness unit by unit and come up with a plan to improve it.”

This got them working again, instead of sulking. We’d drawn up plans for many different goal environments. Now that we had finally arrived, ninety-five percent of those plans were useless. I consoled myself with one thought: at least this wasn’t an underwater campaign.

I took the time to study the looming mountain, zooming in to run a camera over the terrain. “See those blast marks?” I asked Robinson, tapping on the screen.

“They look like recent hits,” said Robinson. “There are a lot of them. I’d say they are the result of the Macro bombardment. Maybe that’s why we aren’t under any kind of barrage yet. They probably took out their missile and artillery emplacements.”

I nodded. “Sounds right to me. Now, give me the bad news. What can we do to adapt to an underground campaign?”

“The hovertanks will probably not function underground as currently designed,” Robinson told me. “They are built for wide open spaces. I’m assuming the tunnels will be too small for big Macro machines—and that’s why they brought us.”

“Their ability to apply logic is certainly stronger than our own,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to keep bitterness out of my voice. Why hadn’t I put this possibility higher up on our list? It seemed so obvious in retrospect.

“Yes, ah—the hovertanks are built for long range, for flying fast over open terrain. Their beam turrets are high and not built to run into rock ceilings. We will have to do a full redesign to make them effective underground.”

“Okay,” I said, “what about our troops?”

“We have decent gear for this environment. We’ve been emphasizing lighter, lower-powered equipment to reduce the weight of each marine’s kit. Our marines should do fairly well even with the high gravity. To prepare for underground operations, we’ll use the factories to produce more effective tunnel-rat equipment.”

“Good. What about our mobile base?”

“Not good,” said Robinson. “If the hovertanks won’t fit into a tunnel, then the bricks certainly won’t. They can’t be significantly reconfigured. This means when we set up our base, it will have to be out in the open. Our supply lines for men, machines, ammo and medical will all have to trace down into the tunnels. The deeper we go, the longer and more vulnerable these lines will become.”

I crossed my arms, closed my eyes and thought hard. I couldn’t see a way out of the scenario he was painting. Tactically, we should win in the open, if they faced us here. But once underground, every foot we went deeper into their lairs, they would have the increasing advantage.

As I tried to think I realized the heavy gravity was setting in, forcing my heart to pump harder. My body and mind felt sluggish. I opened my eyes again when the floor rolled under my magnetic boots. We had landed.

“It’s go time!” I shouted, clapping my hands together. “Tell the hovertank pilots to rev up. Put a fireteam of four into each vehicle. We’ll send out six of them, and if they survive, then six more.”

Everyone took up their com-links and began talking at once, relaying my instructions.

“External cameras, I want a feed from the hold. Aim it at those big doors.”

My staff soon had the image on the screen. The big floods were on. The floor of the hold was buzzing with activity. Marines scuttled to the back of the hovertanks and were swallowed by them. They each carried lighter rifles, similar to the ones I’d first built for the failed attempt to hold back the Macros in Brazil. The heavy beamers were just too much weight for this world. They also carried gleaming combat knives and light beam-pistols like the practice units Sandra and I had used in the training bricks.

I watched the men with a surge of pride. I’d help build them up, and they were rushing eagerly to invade a world we’d never even seen up until this moment.

The big doors at the back of the cylindrical Macro transport split to form a cross of lurid red light. The cross widened and yawned as the four leaves spread open. We’d been hiding in this tin can so long, everyone was blinking at the unaccustomed light.

The mountain was directly ahead of us. I could see only the base of it, filling my view of the world. It was like a reddish-brown wall of crumbling stone. A wall so tall it had to have been built by the hands of gods.

“The bottom leaf has touched down, sir,” said Captain Sarin.

“Go! Hovertank group one: Go, go go!” I shouted into the com-link. Every hood in the taskforce buzzed with my words.

The first line of hovertanks surged forward as if goaded. They swept out of the hold and immediately separated into two groups of three, heading off to either side of the transport.

“Should we release the second squad, sir?” asked Major Robinson.

“Let me see the feed from the hovertanks first,” I said.

We watched the screens. Three hovertanks split into two groups and vanished. The view from the command tank was relayed to a window in front of me. I dialed for clarity. The image was jumpy as the tank swept around the Macro transport in a widening circle. I saw and heard laser fire.

“What are they shooting at? Turret view!” I said.

I caught a glimpse of a dead bug, a worm-like thing that closely resembled the creature I’d killed on the dissection tables. Its back was burned away and steamy vapor rose from the carcass. It appeared to be unarmed.

I heard more turrets firing. Red digits floated above the various hovertanks on the screen, rapidly flipping to new values as the computers recorded and displayed their hit-miss ratios.

“Reset those turret scripts. Put them on defensive-fire, not aggressive-fire. Our mission here is to destroy resistance, not perform genocide.”

I flipped through the different views. “Who set those tanks to autofire?” I asked.

Major Robinson lifted a hand—the hand transformed into an accusing finger which pointed at me. “It’s still your basic script, sir. Those things aren’t human, they tripped the software as enemies. Just as you would have wanted if they had come up on the beaches of Andros Island.”

I hissed a long breath through my teeth. He was right. If those things didn’t qualify to my AI as alien and possibly hostile, I didn’t know what would. I recalled back on Andros Sandra had freaked me out a little bit with her idea of having kids plant bombs at the base of my beam turrets. Taking an approach of letting the other guy shoot first was too dangerous, I’d realized…. I had written the turret scripts to identify suspicious alien attackers and to fire first. At the time, I’d been thinking of Macros sneaking up on my laser turrets, but now these seemingly harmless locals had set off my software.

“Okay, mistake number forty-two. Someone write that one down, please.”

Running this high-tech army was a lot like programming, I realized. Except that with each error I made, things died.